


Don't Tell Me (How This Game Ends)

by theZanyArthropleura



Category: Godzilla - All Media Types, Power Rangers
Genre: Eco-vigilantism, Environmentalism, F/F, LGBTQ Themes, Morally Ambiguous Character, Religious Discussion, Telepathy, discussion of potentially distressing death and violence, gritty realism at points, head-sharing, inspired by that writing prompt about a villainized god finding out their agenda is popular now, megazord fights at other points, monster island ensemble by way of various rangers, the graphic violence tag is not just the kaiju
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:07:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 42,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theZanyArthropleura/pseuds/theZanyArthropleura
Summary: The human race had earned Battra’s ire long before they sealed the world’s kaiju away in power coins, seemingly intending to harness the creatures’ energy and abilities for their own use. Imprisoned and abandoned for nearly two decades before being assigned a host, alone with only his thoughts for the duration, the dark moth had meditated upon the futility of communicating to the species the gravity of their destructive nature. It was an aggravating burden on the mind, more than anything of true productive value, to realize how ignorant and uncaring humans would always remain of the planetary catastrophe they continued ever to push themselves toward, undeterred.Thishuman had said “yeah, same” and Battra was still trying to figure out how to process that.—OR—Power Rangers: Godzilla Force, from the perspective of a recurring villain/uneasy ally
Relationships: Battra (Godzilla) & Original Female Character(s), Mothra & Battra, Original Female Character(s)/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 5





	1. A Mothra Darkly

It was never easy to pinpoint exactly where the small coastal town ended and the skyscraper-laden business district began, but Masako’s home was Desolation, and Desolation was an island, hidden away in the heart of the city.

You didn’t get to it by boat or plane or bridge, you just knew where to look. Here, the marker was a chalk drawing of a turtle skeleton, scrawled on the brick-wall corner of the second-floor apartment above a small family kitchen, a few storefronts deep on the right side of a narrow alley leading away from the main road.

Passing by the corner, Masako stepped into the dark zone of several forgotten city blocks, eyes all around watching her progress with the quiet stoicism of fear and respect. And sometimes other emotions, too unique to faithfully put into words. There was sadness, too, but that, Desolation was never without. On the good days, it was the bleak kind of sadness, turned bright by the lights one managed to cling to when hope had foreseen none at all.

The scent on the wind was fresh cooking from the kitchen and several others, a shared kindness on the threshold between worlds, but the air carried the sounds too, and between the bustle of nighttime traffic, was the whisper of a loud and bold, revving engine.

All at once, expressions became stone, shutters were pulled from ceilings, candles were blown to heated smoke, and the few bodies daring to brave the darkened grounds fell to hurried movement without daring even to whisper. Masako’s bandaged hands found the worn pockets of her leather jacket, layered metal cylinders encircled in the warm embrace of a familiar, steady grasp.

Engines roared louder on the approach, handlebar-mounted headlamps filtering through windows and along walls like the searchlights they doubled as in the makeshift blackout. Aside from the moon above and the ambient glow from the rest of the city outside the unofficial borders, only the motorbikes and whatever handheld lamps they’d brought with them lit the path ahead of the Red Bamboo’s advance.

Masako was still as ice behind the crumbled remnant of a once-decorative wall, a rear-drawn elbow signaling back several others who’d been caught outside in the chaos. With the moonlight glinting off her face enough to show direction of movement, she fixed her gaze on the nearest set of reinforced doors – only a short, but likely attention-drawing run away – and followed up with a firm nod to the most senior of the group.

The girl returned the nod. It was Akane – more specifically, Akane W.

Almost twenty years had done nothing to dethrone the name of Kiryu’s first pilot from the top spot when it came to popularity, and all Akanes in Desolation had to be distinguished by an initial, given that at the highest count, the small, unofficial, mid-city settlement with a population of under a hundred had housed _nine_ of them. To be wholly fair, two of those had been named by their parents, so they, at least, couldn’t be counted as intentionally perpetuating it.

If one were a stickler for technical chronology, Akane W. was only twenty-five, still four years Masako’s senior, and though rightly terrified, she’d also never looked more grateful to be able to defer to the community’s _de facto_ leader.

Masako’s stern grimace was to her, a smile and a promise, bare and bruised knuckles counting off from three as footsteps neared.

As the third finger re-sealed its grip around the metal handle, the group of stragglers bolted through the remains of the courtyard and up the small stairway to the building’s entrance. There was a startle, a shout, and a charge from around the bend of the wall, and Masako leapt one-footed into her rounding swing.

The baton in her left hand extended through the distance, cracking the first man’s skull with one hit. He folded to the ground like an accordion, a crimson red quarterstaff bouncing off his knees.

From the glance, she was pretty sure the man she’d just killed was a Lieutenant.

The weapons were wood, not actual bamboo, but the bumbling joke of a modern-day organization took the name a bit more _literally_ than their at least halfway-competent predecessors. These days, a Red Bamboo Lieutenant was anyone who could get enough blood splattered on their weapon to turn it entirely red.

The four men who’d been in formation behind the first all had visible shades of tan on their combat-grade rank insignias, one of them carrying an out-of-the-box pristine baseball bat with several long metal spikes driven through it. At their leader’s fall, they collectively suffered a moment’s hesitation. Today, it would be their last.

Masako ducked low, taking out one man’s knee with her newly-extended right baton and reversing it for a lunging upward strike into another’s chin, audibly shattering teeth. The last two had enough time to bring their weapons into the fray, but Masako handily blocked a swing from the bat and struck away a barbwire-wrapped quarterstaff hard enough to make it rattle. Swinging her weapons back inward, she clocked both Red Bamboo in the foreheads, either killing them or knocking them out cold. It wouldn’t matter until cleanup anyway.

Stepping and leaping off another partial wall, Masako twisted the handles of her batons together midair and dropped into an overhead swing of her combined metal staff, putting her full weight on the next lieutenant’s own staff and splintering it in half in his hands.

They _hated_ that.

He didn’t have enough time to fully process his outrage, as the reversing swing of the metal weapon’s other end cracked his skull into itself. If he’d stayed standing, the next, horizontal swing in the flurry would have crushed in his throat, but since he failed to, it knocked a different guy’s jaw out of alignment instead. A furious twirl downed two more Red Bamboo in one hit, and a reversing thrust hammered one baton end into the last man’s sternum, his breath hitching with a series of simultaneous, sharply-pitched cracking sounds.

The next two who rounded into the fray were wearing backpacks with large, translucent canisters filled with a yellow liquid, and Masako bolted for cover with a yell of alarm that turned quickly to a yelp of intense pain. Behind the flimsy cover of a disused bus station, she grunted and seethed as the several drops that had grazed her hissed smoke, burning new holes through her jacket and into her left shoulder.

Masako didn’t pray to heaven, but if the others hadn’t made it to the door yet, she’d find a way to make the Red Bamboo pray for hell.

The acid cannons had melted halfway through the bus stop, because that was apparently a more fun way to get to her than walking around it. At least the sounds of the motors on arrival meant they only had the backpacks this time.

In another moment, all that was left of Masako’s cover was a quickly-shrinking wall of compressed metal, the bulk of which was barely recognizable as the newspaper dispenser it once was. Stepping away from the melting slag, she untwisted her staff.

She turned on her heel just as the wall of cover descended to near eye level, and the two batons flew from her hands, crossing the distance in a flash and embedding down the muzzles of the two acid cannons. Masako had _no_ idea how that had worked, but she wasn’t going to question it as she used the shrinking newsstand as a stepping stone and leapt through the air.

A spinning kick to the head took out the attacker on the left, and Masako was able to pull her half-melted baton out of the dropped cannon in time to spray the rest of the canister’s contents into the other man’s face and chest. He died screaming, and as the body fell, Masako knew she would regret that in a few hours, but right now it felt deserved.

Her skin was stinging from the corrosive steam in the air above the bus stop she’d leapfrogged, but the sound of retreating engines – far fewer than there had been on arrival – was enough to allow herself one breath. The rest of her strength was put to use when she stood quickly from the scene, and stumbled her way back to the courtyard entrance. There were no bodies aside from the squad she’d taken out by the outer wall, but she didn’t let herself breathe again until she’d made it to the threshold, opening the door to horrified gasps but smiling with relief at the concerned faces around her as she collapsed on the floor.

  


* * *

  


Five hours later, with a fresh pair of batons and a one-hundred-seventy percent increase in total bandage cover, Masako drove an unmarked, covered pickup to the edge of the river. The acid guy was, as predicted, a disgusting hassle to throw over, but it was still always a good day when there were only Red Bamboo in the truck.

“Impressive, _very_ impressive!”

The words were accompanied by an obnoxious clapping sound, and Masako turned around with a scowl more than a warning, though she was as on-guard as ever.

A man lingered in the shadows, wearing a leather jacket that was easily newer and much more intact than Masako’s own. His hair was heavily styled with product, and his thick-frame glasses reflected an intense glow despite the fact there weren’t any lights around nearly bright enough for them to do that.

“This some black-ops government bull-crap?” Masako sneered, despite knowing by the stranger’s tone that his interest was the farthest thing from official. “Whatever you’re gonna try, let me remind you I just made a bit more room in this truck, and it’s a hell of a short drive to right where we’re already standing.”

The man stepped forward from the shadows with a grin, the light on his lenses shifting but not to the point they actually became see-through. “I’m only here to make an _offer_ , and one I’m sure you’ll be… quite interested in.”

Masako stared him down, not budging. “Okay, what is it?” she deadpanned.

“To the point, I like it,” the man’s voice crawled as he pulled a silver briefcase up into view. Where the size might have suggested a weapon larger than a pistol or an arrangement of conveniently-fitting paper bills, the opened case revealed an interior that was almost entirely black spacing foam.

With the sole exception of the small, ornate medallion at the center.

Masako’s eyes were drawn to it not entirely of her own will, a strange whisper lingering in the back of her mind but yet to take shape.

Cast in silver, the metallic frame formed a loose, tight crescent with the opening facing downward. The small loop where it would apparently attach to a chain was stylized at the end of a segmented oval, like an insect’s abdomen, with the thorax and head continuing down the midpoint width of the crescent. The narrowing, sickle like points on either side were, in fact, stylized depictions of a butterfly or moth’s wings, jagged-edged and patterned with a strange, lightning-like detail. Ultimately, the whole of the crescent frame was shaped as if the insect’s wings were wrapping forward, past the spiky-looking head, and around the purple gemstone set into the lower part of the frame’s larger circle.

A purple gemstone that seemed to _glow_ the more Masako looked at it.

Several thoughts were passing through her head, not all of them her own. “What’s the catch?”

“Oh, no catch!” the man insisted, with a smirk that said there definitely _was_ a catch. “We’ve just been looking to bequeath this item to… a _suitable owner_ , who will use it well.”

“You mean use it the way _you_ want me to?”

“No,” the stranger shook his head, feigning innocence and still smiling. “Use it the way _you_ want to.”

Masako considered, and as she looked into the stranger’s stupidly punchable face, she could already tell he was so, _so_ fucking far out of his depth that he couldn’t even begin to guess why.

 _I know you_ , Masako thought with a grin, to herself and one other. _They called you a monster… but I know you were a God._

She reached out and took the coin, and the man made no move to stop her. She held it before her, and the man watched her with a smile. She held out her hand, and red lightning slammed the man against the wall behind him, his body convulsing as it burned away to ash.

As the half-charred corpse dropped to the ground, it split suddenly apart from the top of the head to the center of the chest. Between the hollow halves of the dead man’s head, was another head entirely, colored silver and shaped vaguely like an oyster set on end. Tubes ran up the throat to the corners of a dead mouth, and dark surface veins like tree roots spread out along either shell-like side of its skull.

“Huh,” Masako recalled vaguely. “Isn’t that one of those ‘Xilien’ things the Rangers are beating up on all the time?”

She shrugged, and dragged the body to the edge of the river, rolling it off with a kick like the others. It disappeared especially quickly beneath the surface, accompanied with a squeaky, garbled, chittering-like sound, and Masako was left to wonder whether the aliens were denser than humans or had a physiology that reacted strangely with water.

  


* * *

  


Masako had enough preservation instinct not to linger long at the river’s edge, nor return to Desolation right away. That left one of the many rooftops she had easy and stealthy routes to, one high enough to grant eyes on the multiple sections of the city divided by the intruding inlets from the bay. Lights from the many buildings reflected a faint shimmer off the black glass of the water, as the seemingly-endless night drew ever on.

“So… _Battra_ ,” she began, half-musing and half-speaking, as she held the amulet between her scarred fingers and watched the silver and deep amethyst catch the light.

The lingering whispers rose to a steady rumble.

_ …DO NOT ADDRESS ME, MORTAL. _

Masako paused, puckering her lips and loosening her grip on the coin enough for it to tilt toward falling. _That could have gone better._

_ I DOUBT IT COULD. _

_Right. Telepathy._ Masako blinked away her wide eyes and rolled them instead. _Is this what all the Rangers have to deal with?_

_ I KNOW NOT OF THESE ‘RANGERS,’ BUT YOUR PRESENCE HERE IS UNWELCOME. HUMANITY HAS NO RIGHT TO MY POWER. _

Raising a brow, Masako channeled red sparks over her other hand, illustrating a point. “Seems like you don’t have much of a say in that…” she challenged aloud.

_ I SENSE YOU KNOW, THIS IS ONLY A FRACTION OF WHAT I CAN ACCOMPLISH. YOUR KIND’S MEDDLING HAS DONE MUCH, BUT YOU WILL FIND THAT BATTRA CANNOT BE CHAINED SO EASILY. _

“Makes sense.” Masako leant her head fully back against the heating unit, the few visible stars above filling her vision.

Whatever having the coin meant – which _felt_ like a big deal, even omitting her vague knowledge of the Rangers and their apparent ties to particular kaiju from the age of monsters – it was more than a little exhausting to try to figure out all at once. Breathing quietly while counting the sparse, distant bright spots the city’s light pollution hadn’t managed to drown out, Masako was content to let the moment linger unspoken, a least for a while longer.

Battra wasn’t.

_ YOUR KIND IS PROUD AND ARROGANT, AND YOU BRING ONLY DESTRUCTON TO THIS EARTH. YOU ARE A PLAGUE UPON THE PLANET BENEATH YOUR FEET, FOOLS WHO SEE NOT ITS WORTH AND DRIVE IT EVER CLOSER TO RUIN. YOU THINK ONLY OF GREED AND POWER WITHOUT CARE FOR THAT WHICH PROVIDES YOU WITH LIFE. YOU HAVE SHOWN YOURSELVES TO BE UNDESERVING OF ALL THE EARTH HAS GRANTED YOU. ONLY THE CLEANSING OF YOUR INFECTION UPON THIS WORLD CAN SAVE WHAT LITTLE REMAINS OF IT, AND WHAT FRACTION OF EVEN THAT WILL ENDURE IF YOU CONTINUE ON THIS PRESENT COURSE OF IGNORANCE. _

Masako’s long breath became a heavy whistle in the air on exhale, the amulet again passing unconsciously between twisting fingers. “Yep.”

_ …WHAT. _

If Masako had happened to have formed a cartoonish, chibi-style picture of an angry, ranting, bug-eyed, dark green and spike-covered moth in her head, that picture of a moth would have just blinked, despite the physiological impossibility.

“I said yeah… same,” Masako pushed on, “except nobody listens when you say it like _that_. Must’ve given that speech thirty damn times before I figured it out.”

Her mental image of Battra was still blinking. _YOU…_

“You’re _right_ , and I agree with every word,” Masako clarified with a knowing smirk. “Does that surprise you?” She looked intently down at the moth-shaped design on the amulet. _I thought you could read my mind or something._

Battra sputtered, which was a weird thing to happen inside Masako’s head. _ONLY THOSE THOUGHTS YOU ACTIVELY BRING TO THE SURFACE, WHICH I ASSURE YOU, GRANTS YOU FAR LESS CONTROL THAN YOU MAY THINK… IN THE FUTURE, PLEASE REFRAIN FROM BECOMING DISTRACTED._

Masako smirked, actually sort of impressed at Battra’s composure, but she supposed there was a pretty big cultural gap between humans and guardian moths anyway. _Who’s distracted? Weren’t we discussing your utter shock at my shred of basic concern for the planet I live on?_

_ YOUR AWARENESS IS NOTABLE… _

And he’d definitely said – _thought_ – ‘notable’ like it was the highest honor he would ever, _ever_ consider giving to a human.

_ …BUT YOU MUST, AFTER ALL, SUFFER THE SAME FAILINGS AS THE REST. NO HUMAN CAN TRULY COMPREHEND, LET ALONE ACCEPT, THE PRICE THAT MUST NOW BE PAID FOR ANY HOPE OF THE EARTH’S SALVATION. _

_You mean ‘kill all humans?’_ she thought with a smirk, though it faltered.

She couldn’t _lie_ , but maybe…

“You’re right, you got me,” Masako spoke with a smile, looking the coin in where its eyes would be if the design had clearer detail. “I want to live, and _maybe_ there’s a few other people around I might actually still care about, but that’s the _exception_ , not the rule. People are _monsters_ , and you can mind-check me on that all fucking day. The _best_ case you’ll find is bone-headed ignorance, because the rest of ‘em have moved on to getting their kicks out of being cruel. On the flipside, yeah, there’s people like me, who know what the fuck needs to get done, but there aren’t nearly enough of us or any real shot at power in order to make it happen…”

Masako stared into the abyss of the coin, and twisted an evil smirk.

“…Until _now_ , that is, so… so maybe we don’t agree on _everything_ , and maybe we never will, but the way I see it? You want to destroy _one hundred percent of humans_ , and so _what_ if I’m only cool with ninety? You want to spend all night and day arguing about that last ten percent – and that’s a _generous_ ten percent – or do you want to start saving the goddamn Earth?”

Only silence graced her thoughts.

_It’s a better deal than you thought you’d get._

_ …BATTRA FINDS THIS AN ACCEPTABLE ARRANGEMENT… HUMAN. _

“Good.”

Masako’s eyes narrowed as gears turned. She stood, and scanned through the buildings visible from her location. She smiled a bit at the fact the local comic shop had put up some kind of large, ant-shaped decoration on the outside of their building since the last time she’d been, but her target was… sure enough, the barest of bright spots like a fading candle, out at the right-angle corner point where the city district poked at the bay.

_If it’s reckless ecological destruction you want to put a stop to… I know exactly where we can start._

  


* * *

  


Dim light, overpowered by the moon alone, shone from the rectangular watchtower, positioned like a lighthouse at the dock’s outer corner. The rest of the multi-level, square concrete platform was crawling with at least a dozen workers, all hurriedly offloading metal drums from trucks and rolling them to the two water-facing edges.

Masako almost laughed. Only the fact they’d waited until late at night to start dumping kept it from being entirely too comical. This company had certainly greased a lot of hands under the table, hopefully with whatever vile, murky green substance they’d just begun pouring into the bay.

They had private security, too – at least six nightstick-wielding guards that Masako could see, and probably a few she couldn’t. Well-trained, likely ex-military, and padded over in heavy armored vests. That, and the fact the station was a small, open-air space, with little in the way of cover aside from any unattended drums, had so far kept her away.

She turned to the reflective glass of a large, darkened window beside her on the warehouse roof, taking in her own short-cropped hair, scowling visage, and battle-worn leather jacket.

“So… what’ve you got for me?”

Reflective silver washed over her body like jagged tendrils of spreading frost, followed quickly by a second wave of green and black that spread out and took a solidified shape. Predictably, Masako’s ranger armor consisted primarily of midnight green, flexible panels over a black undersuit, with heavier, faintly yellow-edged scaled plating on the gauntlets and calf-guards. Additionally, her gauntlets each featured a set of two red-orange-glowing, backward-curving spikes that functioned as blade-catchers, and three lighter, yellow-orange glowing horns crowned a fierce, dark green helmet with a silver mouthplate and two slanted, red oval bug-eyes for a visor.

“ _Nice_ ,” Masako adored with an unseen smirk, the single word sounding all the more badass with the voice filter. “But it’s still missing something…”

More nano-metal activity began from her shoulder blades, producing four large sheets of thick, flexible material – two that draped down her back and two larger, more sharply angled ones that rolled over forward. The yellow edges joined together down her front and back, and under her arms, forming a deep green, jagged-edged longcoat with lightning-like patterns of thinly yellow-edged red running down to the four blade-like coattails.

“ _That_ works.” She liked the look of the helmet nodding along, and crossed her spiked arms over the new coat with another extended nod of approval. “Let’s see what you can do.”

As she leapt from the roof’s edge, the coat parted into four sections resembling Battra’s wings, trailing behind her like a cape and falling back over her into the longcoat the moment she hit the ground. The workers had only a moment to startle before she looked up and started forward, flexing her gloves to build charges of red lightning along her forearms before lunging clawed fingers out ahead of her. A wide fan of bolts knocked four workers off their feet, leaving orange-glowing, smoking burns in their sternums as they hit the ground, unmoving.

There were shouts and hurried movement from the slightly-raised section to her left, and she turned to where three of the guards were shoving workers aside to move in on the threat. The red lenses of Masako’s mask cackled purple for an instant, then unleashed concentrated beams of purple energy, sweeping a horizontal arc across the platform. The men that weren’t instantly burned in half across the middle were launched into the air when the double-beam’s path intercepted and detonated several chemical drums, the fiery explosions sending burning, screaming bodies sailing away from the dock and into the bay.

She turned her attention back ahead, and fired a shorter burst of eye-beams that burned molten holes through two more guards exiting from the ground-floor door of the watchtower. A semi-casually-thrown bolt of red lightning struck another worker off the edge to her right, and many more danced from her fingers to the remaining targets as she stepped into a twirling spin that made her wing-coat catch air.

One idiot had gotten in close, swinging his nightstick as Masako rounded towards him. The entire Battra suit cackled red as it shifted to pure energy, lunging forward around both weapon and guard in a concentrated bolt of lightning that immediately reconstituted the ranger several meters ahead on the other side. Only moderately disoriented by the teleportation, Masako turned on her heel and sent a pair of lightning blasts into the guard’s back, holding them until they burned out through his chest and he collapsed with a pained yell cut short.

Masako stared at her hands, turning them over to confirm they were solid again. _We can DO that?_

 _I PASS THROUGH AN ENERGIZED STATE WHEN SWITCHING BETWEEN LARVAL AND IMAGO FORMS_ , Battra explained, _BUT IT IS AN ABILITY I CAN ONLY CALL ON SPARIN—_

Three more guards poured out of the tower, and Masako leapt into pure energy. She resolidified with an elbow cracking against the first man’s ribs, jolted a diagonal and appeared with a knee collapsing the second’s abdomen, and struck a reverse, zig-zagging angle toward the third, materializing fists caving downward into his skull. Another bolt carried her past and into the tower doorway, where she raised her hands and sent lightning cascading up through the open-plan stairwell and burning through the several people still inside the building. She quickly struck back out again, reappearing in the middle of a now-silent loading dock.

_…What was that? You wanted to say the teleporting works just fine?_

_ THAT IS NOT WHAT IT IS FOR. _

At that moment, three sets of boots hit the ground to her right, and Masako turned back to face the building she’d leapt from to begin with. In her exact same landing spot were three new figures rising to meet her, the leader in shining black armor flanked by the two others in steel grey and a metallic auburn-reddish brown.

Masako let her arms fall slack to the sides, sighing. “And, of course, the Rangers show up to spoil the fun.” She made a show of mock surprise as she looked to the bodies all around her, then visibly restored her own confidence. “Oh, no, you _didn’t_ , because you’re _too late_ to save the _poor, defenseless_ corporate lackeys poisoning the water supply.”

She crossed her arms and tilted her helmet, _daring_ them to talk back.

_ WHO ARE THESE RANGERS? OTHER HUMAN BEARERS OF THE COINS? _

_Got it in one_ , Masako thought with a half-smirk, half-scowl. _They have the power to change things, but they don’t. They go around playing ‘hero,’ but only when there’s a monster on the loose to punch with a giant robot. Bunch of self-entitled teenagers in kaiju costumes who never did anything heroic except clean up their dedicated bad guy’s messes. Just let me know how hard you want me to hit ‘em and I’ll try not to enjoy it more than you do._

There was a challenge in the silver teeth surrounding the Godzilla ranger’s visor, his fists curling inward and tensing with disgust. The Anguirus ranger took a threatening step forward and made a noise that might have been an audible _snarl_. Only the Rodan ranger seemed to keep her cool, but her own readied, clenched fists were far from agreeable.

But if any of them were going to say anything, the twin red-orange beams that stuck Masako in the right shoulder beat them to the punch.

Masako gasped and hissed, rounding as steam rose from the burn on her armor. At least this time, the damage hadn’t burrowed through to her skin.

The fourth ranger hit the ground, black and yellow forewings and red hindwings reshaping into a similar, if less jagged longcoat to Masako’s own. The two zipper-forming edges were a sharply-contrasting yellow, while red and orange eyespots graced the lowered front coattails, the lightning-like triple tendrils of gold crawling down to rest and curve just above. Her armor was white on her upper arms and thighs, but black from knees and elbows down to gold gloves and boots, the panels of her gauntlets and calf guards outlined and segmented thickly in more, reflective gold. Her helmet was striped-around with gold-edged black like an hourglass, wider at her mouthplate and at the top of her head between protruding, but surface-fused antennae, and narrower between the bold, white rings that surrounded her wide, blue oval and hex-patterned eye-lenses.

A furious _scream_ echoed through Masako’s ringing skull.

_** MOTHRA! ** _

_…I take it you two have some history?_

Light gathered at the Mothra ranger’s antenna ridges, a short warning before she fired a barrage of dual-beams that struck the ground at farther and farther distances as Masako leapt back. As the firing angle neared the horizontal, Masako teleported out of the way, reappearing far enough to the Mothra ranger’s left to make her quickly turn.

Masako cackled just a bit, building red lightning charges in her hands, but the Mothra ranger leapt upward at an angle, dodging the first bolt and catching air away from the second by gliding on extended wings. As Masako began to track the new angle above, the Mothra ranger kicked a deflection off the side of the watchtower and dropped back toward the outmaneuvered Battra ranger with a piledriving elbow.

Having physically leapt backward that time, Masako barely made sufficient space before countering with Battra’s purple eye beams. The Mothra ranger swung her wings forward, a sparkling field appearing between the edges and scattering the beams into a cluster of narrower energy lances that shot back in reverse. Energy teleportation carried Masako out of the line of fire and placed her behind her opponent, a solidifying, spinning kick catching the Mothra ranger in the lower back. Another pair of beams struck the moth of light as she fell, sending her hard to the concrete ground.

Feet hit Masako along the backs of her shoulders, toppling her over as well, but she stumbled into a distance-gaining forward lunge and rounding spin, rising face-to-face with the Rodan ranger.

The woman’s visor was shadowed by the beak-shaped brim of her helmet, burnt orange against the auburn, a color also held by the diamond-shaped studs running down the narrow, slat-like segments of her form-following torso armor. She thrust her arms out to the sides, and more of the lighter color became visible in the stretches of fibrous material that formed gliding wings, stretching from her waist to the ends of the baton-like extensions that had just slid out from the underslung edges of her gauntlets. She swiftly brought those arms and wings forward, a burst of propulsion energy from the gauntlet structures simulating a gust of wind before the hidden central weapon barrels followed up with narrower purple heat beams.

Sent backwards and off her feet by the first attack, Masako felt the second strike her in the upper chest, the coat taking most of the damage. She finally managed to call herself into the energy state just as the Rodan ranger began to charge and swing her left wing-arm like a weapon.

Masako struck her in the twin-horned back of her head with an elbow, following up with her own purple beams for good measure. The material of a blocking wing seemed able to momentarily take the damage, but not the blowback power, and the Rodan ranger ended up propelled off the dock and into the water.

Masako barely had time to duck below the long, silver sword the Godzilla ranger had pulled from his back sheath and swung at her head. The weapon had a black handle, but the crossguard was silver too, and really formed more of an extension of the blade, shaped almost candlestick-like into four smaller points. The smaller blades paled in comparison to the main length, but gave the weapon an overall shape that generally resembled one of Godzilla’s back spines.

He rounded for another swing, and Masako teleported away just as the blade glowed blue, unleashing an arc of propelled energy. When the ranger found his target again, he arced the sword overhead and brought it down in parallel to the ground, sending several charges of blue energy down the blade until it erupted into a wide beam of blue energy along the length and out toward Masako. The Battra ranger dodged, stepping through energy and knocking the Godzilla ranger off his feet with an elbow thrown to the side.

Then, the Anguirus ranger was staring her down, the sharp edge-angle at the front of his faceplate turning the right and left halves of his helmet and visor different shades in the uneven light.

He was more armored than the others, the heavy grey plates reducing the black undersuit to the barest outlines of his joints. Small, conical gold spikes adorned his form in clusters on his shoulderpads, one each at the backs of his elbows, running in parallel, arcing lines over his collarbone and down to the top of his chest, and on his helmet – one directly above his visor and four in a loose crown pointing upward around the back of his head.

The ranger reached behind him, pulling away both the flattish dome that acted as a hind carapace and the handled object beneath it. He brandished a heavy mace and rounded shield, both steel-grey and covered in the same gold spikes.

Masako sidestepped as the first swing of the mace swept low and hit nothing, again as the second inadvertently knocked over a chemical drum, and for a third time as a heavy bash left shattered concrete where her feet had been moments before. It was a rage-filled, brutish attempt at combat, and also apparently a feint, as on the next swing, the ball of the mace extended from the handle on a chain, forcing a teleport that barely managed to take Masako out of the attack’s range in time.

Rounding the spiked flail over his head, the Anguirus ranger snapped his wrist and sent the weight slinging forward, knocking fragments of concrete out of the guard tower as Masako energy-leapt toward the water’s edge and charged up her eye beams.

Although it was his off shoulder being targeted, the Anguirus ranger managed to round the shield into the line of fire just in time, blocking the purple beams with the spike-studded, convex metal surface. Masako didn’t let up, but the shield held against the attack for far longer than the Battra ranger felt safe standing still to continue.

Sure enough, the Anguirus ranger had enough strength and movement to send the weight of his flail higher on a further-extending chain and bring it crashing downward, directly on where Masako would have been if she hadn’t, just then, teleported to directly behind him.

She readied red lightning in her hands, but the Anguirus ranger thrashed suddenly out to the side, the purpose of the movement only becoming clear when Masako heard the edge of the shield ricochet off the corner of the tower and felt it strike her _hard_ in her left shoulder blade.

The steel and gold knight caught the shield back on his left gauntlet like a returning, magnetic frisbee, and swung out for a bash with his now-retracted mace, but Masako scrambled out of range before she initiated her teleport. The trip through energy carried her up two short, wide flights of stairs and into the bed of a now-unoccupied flatbed truck. The moment the ranger’s visor had tracked her there, she threw the movement into reverse, but hooked her fingers around the upper edge of a chemical drum that had never been offloaded.

In the process, the energy state passed part of Masako’s aura on to the canister, temporarily dragging the large cylinder with her into the bolt of red lightning, She stopped on solid ground with a twirl on her reappearing ankle, releasing the drum with its gained momentum and watching it reconstitute as it sailed through the air toward Anguirus.

The shield, and the strength of the bracing body behind it, was more than enough to halt the movement of the heavy projectile, and in fact, the heavy drum _bounced_ off the shield’s spiked surface, diverting almost directly upward.

It rose less than half a meter above the ranger before twin purple beams struck it midair, creating a sudden explosion that knocked the Anguirus ranger not only off his feet, but nearly a half-dozen meters backward to skid along the concrete of the dock’s lowest level.

A beam of blue from the Godzilla ranger’s sword chased Masako out of her former standing spot and off the raised sections of the platform entirely. The Battra ranger wasted little time in racing an energy-jumping, zig-zagging path toward her opponent, firing off short bursts of her eye beams on each stop. The spine-shaped blade seemed capable of taking the hits on its flat side, but the ranger holding it physically stumbled with the impacts.

Masako had nearly succeeded in a leaping kick to the Godzilla ranger’s head when twin red-orange beams struck her off-course, and she ended up in a stumbling roll on concrete that she was pretty sure had twisted her ankle.

She pushed off the ground with a wild, clearing sweep with her eye beams, managing to hit both upright targets for at least a short duration. In their stunned states, Masako teleport-slammed her full weight into the Godzilla ranger, tackling him to the ground just in time to slip her hand around the hilt of the Anguirus ranger’s discarded mace weapon.

Mothra had her wings fully spread, bolts of orange lightning striking forth from their forward surfaces, but Masako energy-leapt past and behind the storm. Exiting the energy state with a spin, she sent out the length of the Anguirus flail, arcing the weight just past the Mothra ranger’s head and catching a loop around her neck with the chain.

The Mothra ranger choked and gasped at just the impact momentum of the heavy chain alone, before Masako had even begun to pull tight. Battra’s rage fueled the muscles that wrenched at the strangling noose, a sense of satisfaction dawning as desperate, gold-gloved fingers hooked into metal links but failed to attain any leverage.

It wasn’t long before green, red, and yellow wings had extended, the Battra ranger pushing off the ground. Despite the involvement of little, if any displacing movement against the air, Masako’s sustained flight pulled strongly upward and away from her ensnared enemy, like a kite trying to escape on a heavy wind.

_Wait. What the fuck am I doing this for?_

The strain in her arms let up, causing the distinct hiss of a partial breath at the other end.

_ NO! MOTHRA MUST BE DESTROYED! _

Beneath her helmet, Masako’s face screwed up at the logic. _That’s not even Mothra, that’s just her ranger! Can you even actually kill a kaiju at this point?_

 _ALL WHO SERVE MOTHRA MUST PERISH AS WELL!_ And then, with a tone that was, well, less tantrum-like and more genuinely confused, _WHY IS THIS JUST NOW AN ISSUE FOR YOU?_

Masako might have had longer to form a reply, if a sudden, rapid gust of wind from above hadn’t completely overpowered the Battra suit’s maintained lift and sent her crashing to the ground, the chain falling slack as the Mothra ranger was also knocked off her feet.

Even the recovering Godzilla and Angurius rangers, as well as the Rodan ranger, recently having climbed back to the dock, were knocked flat to the concrete once again, a cross-shaped shadow passing over their prone bodies on its way to the distorting ripples of the water’s surface beyond.

Filling the air with the soft, but briefly deafening sound of rustling wings, a dragonfly the size of a small, recreational airplane skimmed over the bay for several hundred meters out before taking a sudden nosedive into the shadowy depths.

The Rangers sat up again and turned around to look, though Masako couldn’t be sure whether they’d actually seen the culprit as clearly as she had. Moments later, it hardly mattered, as two more dragonflies of the same size passed farther overhead in unobstructed view, crossing the same distance over the bay before performing the same splashdown.

Masako followed the Rangers’ eyes, keeping her ears tuned for more buzzing, and noted when more dragonflies began approaching from the shore on the other side of the water, barely distinguishable in the golden haze from the clustered buildings. They, too, dropped out of sight around the same point, near the middle of the large, ocean inlet expanse between the two largest portions of the city.

Battra provided a single, darkly-whispered word.

_ MEGAGUIRUS. _

The water in the center of the bay began to bubble harshly as if boiling, and moments later, exploded upward in a geyser, reaching hundreds of meters in the air.

Masako still had to tilt her neck significantly higher than that, to lay her eyes on the gold and violet, insectoid creature that loomed almost deathly silent in the sky above.

A dragonfly whose wings were like those of a dragon, whose forelegs were narrow claws like those of a crawfish, whose tail ended in a downward and forward-curving stinger like that of a hornet, and whose reptilian head boasted a set of lizard-like jaws filled with jagged teeth.

Megaguirus screeched, and left a motion-blur afterimage behind her as she moved more quickly than a human eye could process, appearing at the far end of the bay with her vibrating wings already slicing across skyscrapers mid-flight.

The Rangers turned back around, exhaustion in their stances, and their visors all coldly staring down Masako as she climbed to her feet.

“She was distracting us…” said the Mothra ranger, her quiet words marked equally with scornful judgement and solemn, dawning horror.

Masako put up her hands. “Hey, I had _nothing_ to do with _that_.”

She knew her tone was still ambiguous enough that they probably thought she was gloating. She wasn’t quite sure she would mind, if that were the case.

“It doesn’t matter,” the Godzilla ranger grunted. “Let’s _go_.”

They left Masako standing there on the dock, as they – with visible difficulty – performed their acrobatic leaps of departure, disappearing into the buildings leading away from the water.

Across the bay, Megaguirus was cast even more golden in the lights of the falling city around her, the blur of her afterimage zooming back and forth between the severed and crumbling structures. For a giant, toothy dragonfly, she seemed to be enjoying herself, screeches of apparent amusement filling the air for kilometers around.

The Rodan and Mothra zords were the first on the scene, diving down from the clouds to take the dragonfly kaiju by surprise. Antenna beams from Mothra and a uranium heat beam from Rodan burned deeply enough to draw smoke from either draconic wing, prompting a screech of pain as Megaguirus disappeared quickly out of firing range.

A barrage of golden, cone-shaped missiles rising out of the city heralded the Anguirus zord’s arrival, the payload launched skyward from the robotic ankylosaur’s carapace. Curving to align with their target, the missiles actually managed to track Megaguirus effectively through several zig-zagging bursts of flight, but the dragonfly ultimately managed to lead the projectiles straight into the towering bulk of the Godzilla zord. A beam of atomic breath was knocked off course, tinting a swath of the night sky blue as the machine staggered backward, sparking, out of a cloud of smoke.

The damage to the city was already impressively high, the bodycount likely soaring no matter _how_ empty those buildings were at night. Usually it only got this bad in a long, drawn-out battle against a far more powerful opponent, like Destoroyah or a team of enemy zords.

The difference here was that Megaguirus was _fast_ , causing as much destruction in seconds as most kaiju managed in minutes.

The difference was _also_ that the Rangers clearly weren’t at their best. The flight of the Rodan and Mothra zords demonstrated relatively slow reaction times, their weapon aim slipping as well. The Godzilla zord was taking hits it could usually dodge or tank more effectively, and though the Anguirus zord leapt valiantly from mounds of rubble, its teeth and claws fell short of even Megaguirus’ afterimage before falling back to the earth.

“She was right, wasn’t she?” Masako asked in a whisper, putting all her weight on her uninjured ankle as she stopped at the edge of the water. “We _were_ distracting them.”

_ …WE BOTH KNOW THAT WAS NOT OUR INTENT. _

Masako shook her head. “No, the… the Xilien or whatever. He _knew_ we’d stir up trouble. He _used_ us, to draw the Rangers’ attention and buy time for Megaguirus to set up. By the looks of it, we wore them down pretty bad, too.”

 _The Rangers might lose_ , she added in passing thought, as the battle continued to tilt in Megaguirus’ favor. Finally seeing it about to happen, Masako wasn’t sure how she actually felt about that.

On one hand, it _would_ be satisfying to see them fall, for the part-time heroes of false hope and empty promises to get what they deserved. On the other hand, Megaguirus was a real, genuine factor that needed to be considered, since revenge aside, leaving a giant prehistoric dragonfly around to do whatever afterward would probably lead to some adverse ecological effects, let alone what plans the Xiliens might have for her.

And yeah, occupied buildings were also dropping left and right, and while Masako was long bereft of the energy to care whether ninety percent of the people in them lived or died…

It _was_ still only ninety.

Statistically, at least some fraction of the lives ended by Megaguirus were those whose passing was undeserved enough for Masako to mourn, and that just didn’t sit right.

Especially since this was all at least _a little bit_ her own fault.

Across the bay, the four mechanical kaiju facsimiles gathered for their final play, invoked with far less damage already dealt to the enemy kaiju than they would usually have held out for.

The Godzilla zord’s upper torso split in half, making space to accommodate the head and tail that folded in to become, respectively, the center of the chest and a multiply-split and nested spine between the now-dual columns of silver back plates. The zord’s small arms wrapped around to clip the clawed hands backward over the shoulders to bulk out the upper torso, and the folded-over neck also split apart to allow a megazord head to rise between another divided row of plates.

The Anguirus zord leapt, detaching its tail as it left the ground, and then its main body split apart just below its throat. The bottom half containing the square-tiled underbelly armor swung out behind to become the upper arm, while the zord’s head and four limbs all folded and condensed under the carapace to replace the lost mass and become the inward bulk of the forearm. A grey-plated and gold-fingered fist slid out from where the neck had folded under, and the Anguirus zord attached to the Godzilla zord’s left shoulder, the spiky carapace becoming a forearm shield.

The Rodan zord circled in from behind, its smaller tail retracting inward as otherwise, the same top-bottom split occurred. The section with the diamond-shaped chest spikes formed the upper arm, as the neck, head, and legs condensed under the zord’s back. The wings then folded over the back in a mirror to a roosting posture, forming a second forearm shield as an auburn-plated, orange-fingered hand slid out from behind the folded-away neck and the Rodan zord connected to the Godzilla zord’s right shoulder.

The Mothra zord dove in from above, slotting in its legs to lock with the Godzilla zord’s folding-away back plates. The massive pair of wings lifted the megazord enough for two larva-shaped secondary zords to attach as boots and lower leg armor, the upward-angling spikes at the ends of their tails now protruding from the megazord’s knees.

Megazord Goji hefted the Anguirus zord’s tail as a sword in its Rodan hand, bringing to bear the steel-grey weapon’s gold, spike-serrated edges and the parallel spikes at the end that formed a sort of spade-tip. In a rush, the humanoid mech bolted forward, leaping to a glide with Mothra’s wings and propelling itself by the green energy beams firing from the bottoms of the larval zords’ heads.

Screeching in challenge, the dragonfly kaiju easily dodged the leaping sword-swing, lowering and spinning at the end of her escape path to stare almost gloatingly at the bulky, landing machine’s much slower rounding turn. The megazord brought up its Anguirus-carapace left forearm like the shield it was, and launched a barrage of spike missiles, but Megaguirus rapidly vibrated her wings, creating a distortion around herself that caused the missiles to explode before they could harm her. She barged forward through the projectiles, detonating them with her mere proximity, and wound her right arm into a quick, bashing claw attack that left the stumbling megazord rattled and momentarily unresponsive as she darted away.

“I don’t like that,” Masako decided, shaking her head. “I don’t like being messed with, and don’t like people thinking they can make me a part of their plan and get away with it.”

Reappearing in the megazord’s disoriented, searching view with an announcing screech, Megaguirus broke the sound barrier, darting a low path toward the combined machine with her stinger poised. The attack struck the megazord’s left shoulder, sparks flying as the Anguirus zord was wedged completely off the attachment joint. The tail point continued along its course and punched a hole through the Mothra zord’s left wing, hooking into the metal and tearing away yet another zord as the dragonfly sped past. The Mothra zord was dragged through the air for several city blocks before Megaguirus spun rapidly, throwing the weight free with a pleased screech and watching the helpless machine crash backwards into a crumbling parking garage.

 _Answer me honestly_ , Masako continued, popping the corner of a hollow smirk at the timing of the Mothra zord’s misfortune. _Do you?_

The one-armed megazord stood its ground, sword raised in challenge as Megaguirus snarled a smile and clacked its claws. The dragonfly’s chitter was almost certainly mocking laughter.

_ …THE XILIENS HAVE NO RIGHT TO MY POWER, EITHER. THEY SEEK TO DESTROY THE HUMANS, BUT THEIR GOALS ARE NOT MY OWN. THEY SEEK TO CLAIM THE EARTH FOR THEMSELVES. THEY ARE MY ENEMY. _

_Mine too, then_. Masako smiled fiercely. _One more question… do we get zord, too?_

Distantly, red lightning rocked the deeper waters beyond the bay. Masako turned to her left just in time to watch the upward-striking bolts coalesce in the air above, solidifying from a red glow to a solid, primarily dark green hovering object.

Like all the zords, its appearance was somewhat simplified and rendered with harder edges than its organic counterpart, but down to the colors, horn placement, and wing shape, it was unmistakably Battra, even from several kilometers out.

The zord was drifting slowly closer to shore, but Masako cut the distance with a trip through a lightning bolt, appearing in the cockpit a fraction of a second later. It was spacious for a single pilot seat, with lightly-padded, bright red interior décor, and a pair of hand controls that acted as more of a link to Masako’s power and will than any kind of mechanical steering.

Masako drove the zord forward through the sky, stiff metal wings remaining parallel to the body even through several experimental tilts. She could sense the large reserve of power within the machine, and all the ways she could utilize it, including lightning from the wings and directed, heavy energy beams from the eyes.

_Six hours ago I was beating up gangsters with batons, and now I have a fighter jet._

Megaguirus sped a flurry of glancing strikes around the megazord, easily outpacing the overwhelmed humanoid mech and drawing showers of sparks with each slice of her sharpened wingtips. The machine resorted to throwing a punch with its remaining arm, one Megaguirus easily dodged, the dragonfly reappearing immediately behind her adversary and latching onto both metal shoulders with her claws. Her tail curled up from the left side of the megazord’s waist, the stinger at the end piercing the eye of the Godzilla zord where the saurian head lay dormant at the center of the combination’s chest.

Blue energy surged from the wound, chaotic electrical volts sending the megazord into sparking convulsions while stealthily drawn power traveled back through Megaguirus’ tail. Lingering near the side of the megazord’s head with smug condescension, the toothy, reptilian maw of Megaguirus twisted into a cruel, sadistic smirk.

Twin purple beams struck the dragonfly in the face.

Megaguirus vanished from behind the megazord, and darted back into view, placing itself out over the water and directly in the path of the Battra zord’s rapid approach. A burned face screeched out in rage, wings vibrated to an ascending roar, and the dragonfly charged.

 _Seen that smile too many times not to wipe it off_ , Masako thought with a fury that came easily. _You’re going down, and if your little swarm went hunting anywhere near Desolation, I’ll bring you the fuck back to life just to kill you slower._

She drifted up and to the right and flipped the Battra zord’s wingspan vertical, the zord’s left wingtip drawing sparks against Megaguirus’ armored back as the dragonfly passed underneath. Both combatants rounded in the air and flew in for a second pass, the Battra zord leveling out and firing a series of double eye beams that Megaguirus dodged around in a darting, angled spiral.

The dragonfly opened her claws, clearly ready to grasp Battra by the wings and bring her impaling stinger up from below, but Masako tilted skyward at the last second. The Battra zord’s front pair of mechanical, jointed legs slammed against the top of Megagurius’s head, sending the dragonfly into a brief, disoriented dive while the zord ramped up higher.

Continuing to pull up, Masako completed an upside-down curve, exiting far above the battle into a vertical dive and firing her eye beams downward. Geysers of steam shot upward from the water all around as Megaguirus zig-zagged a frantic path of avoidance, making a break through the raining fire and back toward the cover of the city.

The Battra zord rotated through the dive and leveled out in pursuit, keeping low over the water as long as possible and firing beams upward to force Megaguirus higher into the air. Finally, the small band of coastal docks passed beneath, and Battra ascended to move in.

In a flash, Megaguirus darted to the side, and back into line behind the dark moth. Blue energy cackled at the end of her stinger, the absorbed power from the Godzilla zord coalescing.

Masako banked right, then left, then finally spun a full barrel roll to keep the blue beam from attaining a consistent lock. The back edges of the Battra zord’s wings sustained minor burning damage, but the dragonfly kaiju’s stolen energy expired before the stinger beam could dish out anything further.

Megaguirus screeched, and sped ahead, closing the gap. Masako pulled her zord into a long left curve, tilted and lightning-patterned wings slicing vertically through the air above the city as the dragonfly swerved as well to keep up the pursuit.

On the ground, the megazord aimed its Rodan fist at the sky, unfolding the shield-forming forearm wings until they stretched the zord’s full wingspan out to either side of the arm. A cable of red-orange energy snapped across from wingtip to wingtip, drawing back at the midpoint to sit behind the pommel of the Anguirus tail sword that lowered into place like a crossbow bolt.

It was their final attack, the one they called upon to end every fight, but usually only when a kaiju was at its weakest. Sure enough, the spear-like projectile was dodged handily by a full-speed Megaguirus, and continued on its path into the upper atmosphere before vanishing to pure energy and reappearing in the crossbow arm for another shot.

Even the brief interruption wasn’t enough to shake Megaguirus off Makaso’s tail, or even make enough space to turn around and fire.

Still, seeing the Rangers’ weapon reload for the first time she could remember it ever having needed to, actually managed to give Makaso an idea.

“Hey, Battra? Do you think we still have that… _other_ power?”

Battra sighed, which was also a weird thing to happen inside Masako’s head.

_ THAT IS NOT WHAT IT IS… _

Armored claws slammed down on top of the zord’s wings, sliding forward enough to hook over the front edges and drag Megaguirus fully on top of the machine. Six partially vestigial legs found frictional purchase between the spine-simulating armor ridges in the zord’s carapace. A toothy maw cried out in victory.

_ …YOU KNOW WHAT? GO AHEAD. TRY IT. _

Masako channeled power into the controls, and cackling waves of red energy coursed over the Battra zord, fueling a brightening red glow over the whole of the machine even within Megaguirus’ grasp. The curved point of a stinger lunged upward from below, only for its target to disperse from the physical realm in a blinding flash of red light.

Megaguirus cried out in pain, her stinger now embedded deep into the underside of her own thorax.

A bolt of red lightning struck from above, pushing Megaguirus further onto her stinger and down below building level, all as a forming shape exploded outward from the impact on the dragonfly’s carapace. Six small arcs of energy rounded down past the bases of draconic wings, becoming mechanical legs that secured a cage-like hold around Megaguirus’ thorax. The zord’s own solidifying, stiff metal wings hinged slightly upward and caught the air, overpowering the kaiju’s flight and dragging her sideways across the city.

Drifting into a wide intersection, widened further by damage to the corner buildings, Masako caught sight of the partial megazord directly ahead, crossbow still formed. Infuriatingly, the machine hesitated, the Rangers apparently still unable to process having all the actual work done for them.

“Can I talk to them? I want to talk to them.” Masako voiced aloud, only for the icon of a zord-to-zord communication channel to appear on her viewscreen. “Good. Now… _shoot this fucking dragonfly while I have it contained, you skreeonking banana-oil-headed imbeciles!”_

_ …WHAT WAS THAT? _

_I don’t know, I ran out of good swear words after ‘fuck.’_

Megaguirus struggled, screeching and flailing and slamming the backs of her claws upward against Battra’s wings, all to no avail. The megazord finally aimed the weapon properly, firing the sword directly toward the pinned kaiju.

Masako teleported her zord out of the way at the last second, reforming in the air beside the megazord with a view toward the point of impact.

As the sword pierced the creature’s body, all of the unleashed kaiju’s physical mass was converted back to pure energy, drawn into the weapon’s wake like a collapsing vortex until a bright light took the monster’s place, then vanished with the brief sparkle of a tiny star. Somewhere, Megaguirus dropped into the city’s wreckage, re-sealed into a power coin.

Masako didn’t bother listening to whatever the stunned Rangers had begun to say to her, before turning the Battra zord on a dime and firing a pair of purple energy beams directly into the megazord’s upper torso.

The combined machine sparked, detonations appearing across its frame, and toppled over entirely, laid out flat on the multi-lane city street below.

“Later, losers,” Masako broadcast over shouts and cries of protest, smirking as she cut the line and pulled quickly into the sky. They were probably very confused, and she hoped they would be.

The earliest band of morning light crossed the horizon, brightening the sky as the Battra zord performed several unnecessary barrel rolls, speeding away into the break of dawn.

  


* * *

  


Masako settled into her pillow with a groan as the morning sun poured in through the window, across the corner spread of the wooden computer desk, and into the small bed that occupied most of that side of the room prior to the small nightstand flush with the opposite wall.

She’d tried to cover herself with a sheet, but it had ended up hooked over one foot and twisted tight around her midsection instead, and she’d been too sore and tired to correct it. Warm light bathed bare skin, irritating the freshest of the many bruises and burns across her body.

Blood tricked faintly from a knuckle on her right hand, and she watched the small trail of red flow down the skin to near her thumb. Strangely, though, the bleeding stopped almost as soon as she’d noticed it, and over the next several minutes, she watched the wound seal itself shut.

 _YOUR RANGER STRENGTH IS ASSISTING WITH HEALING YOUR INJURIES_ , Battra supplied at Masako’s confusion.

There was a long, somewhat nervous or hesitant pause.

_ WITH MY OWN POWER, I AM ABLE HEAL THEM INSTANTLY, IF YOU WOULD PREFER. _

… _Yes, that might be helpful_ , Masako deadpanned.

Warm, golden light appeared over the most recent disturbances in her skin, and the night’s worth of pain and soreness eased away. She was still tired, but smiled at the relief, shifting a bit to get more comfortable now that she didn’t have to tiptoe around so many wounds. She snuggled against her pillow with a soft exhale.

_Sorry I can’t be your badass murder-planeteer all the time._

_ BATTRA ACKNOWLEDGES YOU ARE MORTAL. TIMES OF VULNERABILITY ARE TO BE EXPECTED. _

Masako blinked, trying to decide how much of that had been genuine. _I should also probably apologize about how awkward this is going to get, with you in my head all the time._

_ I SEE NO REASON THAT IT NEED BE. _

A smirk almost gave way to a laugh. _We’ll get there, trust me._

Battra was quiet for a long time, almost enough that Masako wondered whether she’d finally get the chance to fall asleep.

_ THESE PEOPLE HERE. THEY ARE THE ONES YOU STILL CARE ABOUT? _

_Yes_ , Masako answered. She hadn’t said anything to the others on her return, about Battra or the battle or anything, but she’d already decided she would. This power would not be kept hidden from those who needed it.

_These people… they know. They know how much destruction humans cause, they’d change it if they could, and everyone here has been hurt by humanity just as much as the Earth has. They don’t deserve to have to fight for their lives every single fucking day, but apparently someone has to, so… so I do._

She hoped Battra’s expectations also applied to the tears in her eyes.

_I’d do anything to keep them safe. Whatever this is, that has to be a part of it. If you want all humans extinct, you can just wait ‘til the end of our lifespans. You’re immortal, I’m sure it won’t be a problem._

_ …IF WHAT YOU SAY IS TRUE, BATTRA FINDS THESE TERMS ACCEPTABLE. _

_Thank you_. Masako closed her eyes with a tearful nod. When she opened them, her gaze fell upward on the reflective glint from the power coin, where it rested on the edge of the desk. _My turn. Why do you hate Mothra so much?_

Battra half-grumbled, half-sighed. Still weird.

_ MOTHRA IS THE DEFENDER OF LIFE, AND TO HER, THIS INCLUDES HUMANITY. SHE BELIEVES SHE CAN SAVE BOTH HUMANS AND THE EARTH. IT IS A FOOLISH BELIEF. SHE WILL CONTINUE TO PROTECT THEM, TO FORGIVE THEIR MISTAKES, UNTIL THE END, NOT INTENDING FOR THE EARTH TO DIE IN THE PROCESS BUT ALLOWING IT ALL THE SAME FOR HER UNWILLINGNESS TO CHOOSE. _

Masako nodded along. _Plenty of people like that, too._

Battra was hesitant, but only for a moment. _YOU SHOW A SURPRISING WILLINGNESS TO ACT, EVEN THROUGH DESTRUCTION AND DEATH. WHY DID YOU REFUSE TO KILL MOTHRA’S RANGER?_

 _Oh, there’s no mystery there. Just plain, unashamed, personal bias_. Masako shrugged with a guiltless, defiant smirk. _You met me while I was dumping bodies in the river, I’m allowed to have bad qualities._

She let the silence settle, reading Battra’s confusion, and lightly sighed.

_Sometimes I just… feel like I could reach people, with enough time. Or that there’s a chance someone might be on my side, even they don’t show it. I’m not always right, but… I guess I want to keep believing the people who give a shit aren’t alone in the world. You said it yourself, Mothra doesn’t actually want to cause that destruction, she’s just hopelessly conflicted._

_ OR DELUDED. _

_Sure. Point is… maybe I empathize too much by default, at least until I get to know someone. It’s selfish, really. Or instinctual. I don’t know_. She stared again at the gleaming edge of the coin. _Haven’t you ever wanted a family?_

Battra was silent, at least for a longer moment. _ONCE, I THOUGHT PERHAPS I COULD._

Masako blinked again, surprised at the admission. _You wanna talk about it?_

_ NO. _

There were no words after that. If Masako knew her history, she had a pretty good idea what Battra was thinking about, but she wouldn’t pry.

She reached up to the desk’s edge, taking the coin and tilting it in her fingers. She lazily watched the silver and amethyst catch the light, then drew in her arms and held the amulet close to her chest, where it would hang once she found a chain for it. The metal was a smooth and foreign texture, but warmed from the sun and not cold against her skin.

_Well, I’ll listen if you ever do._

  


* * *

  


It was night, and engines sounded in the dark. Revving cycles acting only as envoys for the deafening roar that sent pure horror through the souls of all who heard it.

Masako stood her ground, the others gathered far behind her. Most were inside, as she’d pleaded, but some had only just arrived with no time to find shelter. Others were foolhardy in their bravery, but bold in their show of it.

The lead cyclist wasn’t dressed in street clothes like the others. His naval-style suit was silvery grey, his hat and patterned eyepatch all imitated relics of a bygone age. He stood with a smirk as the monstrosity slowed to a stop just behind him.

The pride of the Red Bamboo land fleet was an eighteen-wheeled tanker truck, armored with welded-on steel panels and porcupined with garish, meter-long spikes angled in all directions. Ladders wrapped up around the sides of the tank to the low-railed walkway atop it, where four maneuverable, turret-style heavy acid cannons were piped-in directly to the source, two at the front and two at the rear.

“Ah, chosen to die with dignity?” the leader joked with amusement in his one visible eye. “Too bad you don’t have any. Today is the day all you freaks will be cleansed from this city once and for all.”

Masako returned his confidence, crossing her arms with her own, knowing smirk of defiance. “ _Or_ , it’s the day we find out how flammable that stuff you use is.”

The leader’s eye showed skepticism, in the moment before the wind shifted. His, and those of the rest of the Red Bamboo, rose skyward, while Masako’s remained locked ahead.

A gigantic, winged silhouette passed above, cutting off moonlight between the tops of buildings. Shouts had only begun when the twin purple beams lanced downward, engulfing the tanker truck in a sudden fireball that swept over the entire intersection and several dozen meters down all four roadways like a miniature supernova. The bodies closest were vaporized instantly, those with enough distance merely thrown to the ground with the death sentences of burning chemical fires.

Masako walked slowly through the flames, her ranger gauntlets forming up to her elbows. The few Red Bamboo who had escaped the fire were cut down with casually-thrown energy bolts – including one who technically didn’t need it, as he’d been impaled to the ground by one of the truck’s metal spikes, launched from the explosion like a spear.

The sharply-dressed leader rose in Masako’s path with a yell, but a bolt to his chest threw him back over his downed cycle, weapon dropped from his hand as he lay choking on the ground.

More frost-like metal completed all except Masako’s helmet, her-wing-coat rolling down over her shoulders as she approached the fallen man with a stern grimace.

“Moth…ra?” the leader babbled, staring up to the now-clear night sky with fear, blood trickling at the corner of his mouth as he began to convulse.

“Nope,” Masako snarked coldly as she stepped on his fallen body and allowed her boot to sink into the fresh injury. The leader writhed more intensely, and Masako pressed deep, leaning over so her own, cold eyes were aligned with his. “There’s a _new_ Moth in town.”

Metal formed over her face, solidifying the midnight green helmet and sprouting three glowing, fiery horns. A pair of red lenses closed across the line of their locked gazes, and turned purple.


	2. Ghosts of Monster Island - Part 1

The wind was picking up over the open sea, echoing through the Battra zord like a steady, ominous hissing sound. Turbulence ever-so-slightly rocked the wings as the mechanical moth held course, skimming along the lower edge of the cloud layer.

Through the viewscreen, Masako zeroed in on the faint disturbance in the water below, a blemish of constructed solidity thrown about by strengthening waves.

 _ANOTHER WHALING VESSEL?_ Battra inquired from inside her mind. Given the bulk of the morning’s activities, it wasn’t such a far-off guess.

It would be the fourth they’d sunk to the wretched deeps, today alone.

… _Nah_ , Masako decided, taking in the size and shape, and making out what details she could. _Think smaller, crueler, and more wasteful._

Sent down in a lightning bolt of brilliant red, amid the greys of the sea and brewing storm, the Battra ranger struck into being at the center of the small fishing boat’s top deck, rising from a knee and fist to reveal a crown of fiery horns and wide, burning red, bug-eye lenses of judgement. Fists clenched, below gauntlets augmented with glowing spikes, and the warning colors of red and yellow ran jagged down the shape of a midnight green longcoat taken by stowed wings.

There were shouts, some more confused than fearful, but that distinction failed to linger. It wasn’t long before Masako had burned a man stone-dead with a burst of red energy to the sternum, stolen an entire, flopping mako shark into her arms, and heaved it sideways off the boat in a bridal-style throw that couldn’t have possibly looked intimidating.

Then, a pair of purple eye beams cut a rounding swath across the deck to set it ablaze, burning through equipment and causing the crew to duck and leap away in fear. All trembled before her.

The distant rumble of thunder broke the terrified silence, as Masako cast her fury-filled gaze upon the ship’s captain.

“Please…” the old man begged, palms brought together as if in prayer. “Have _mercy_ … why do you do this, what have we done?”

“What have you—” Masako balked with fury to equal Battra’s. With a motion quick enough it made the men behind her gasp and tremble, she sent a pointing finger toward a wide, plasic basin set into the wooden deck, it’s bottom already filled an inch deep with more vibrantly rose-colored blood than water. “What the fuck do you _mean_ what did you do?”

The man pleaded again. “This is our livelihood! It is all we have! The money is here, on the sea when the land has forsaken us, and whatever I can earn is all I can do for my family!”

Masako sighed, her shoulders slackening as she fell to a low grumble. “Why does this shit have to be so morally complicated?”

_ DOUBTS? _

“Oh, no, don’t worry, I’m still gonna do it,” she assured, refocusing back on the captain and relishing the moment he trembled. “I’m just not gonna feel too good about it.”

Red lenses cackled with purple, and the twin beams shot out at a slightly widening angle, striking the elderly man in both his shoulders. His severed arms fell to the deck, steam rising from the stumps as he cried out in agony.

Masako took two steps forward, and sank the claws of her glove into his fishing vest, lifting him clear off the ground with one arm and bringing his screaming head into a close view of the Battra suit’s fierce helmet.

“Good luck,” Masako snarled coldly with a hiss, and heaved the two-limbed man over the side of the boat, watching the geyser rise as he splashed into the sea.

_Okay, I lied… that did actually feel pretty good._

It was only for a moment, though, as she turned away from the water and toward the other, _horrified_ fishermen still on the boat. The gargled, choking screams from the rush of water below finally made her wince.

“Actually…” she made a slightly apologetic, far-too-casual tilt of her head, then set her hands over the low wall around the deck to peer back over the edge.

Eye beams charged again, ready to at least make the guy’s death quick, when instead, the water all along the side of the boat churned upward in a central mountainous rise surrounded by writhing splashes that cracked like whips.

A pair of bulbous, pale red and slickly reflective mounds rose first from the sea, each inset on its outer side by an immense, lazy yellow eye with a diagonal black pupil slit. A larger mass dragged behind, most of it remaining submerged, but from the visible portion alone, it was easily larger than the boat Masako was standing on. A multitude of tentacles finally broke the surface, some arcing only to slap the water again, with one particularly fierce one swinging the screaming, disarmed captain about through the air by one of his ankles.

The giant octopus heaved itself up out of the water enough to easily swing its caught prey down into the gap between its front tentacles, the beak on its underside snapping shut as the creature’s immense bulk fell splashing back down onto the tumultuous sea.

“Well, that solves _that_ problem…”

The Oodako’s eyes only just now seemed to register the seafaring vessel directly in front of it, and with another heave, it slammed itself forward, rocking the boat enough that even Masako stumbled. When the ranger managed to right herself, she’d made it barely fast enough to watch as the massive octopus dove swiftly underwater.

Tentacles rose from all around the small vessel, catching the other sailors by surprise and snatching them up off the deck, all while the boat continued to shake from the creature’s main body slamming into it repeatedly from below.

“Actually, that solves _all_ the problems!”

Masako gave a mock salute to the struggling, dying sailors, then vanished upward in a return bolt of lightning, reappearing in the Battra zord’s cockpit and watching from safely above as the giant octopus continued to devour the ship’s crew and finally, drag the boat itself down below the waves.

Minutes later, thunder struck one more, and rain began to pour, a great fog rolling over the sea and shrouding the surface in its obscuring mist. The Battra zord was caught in momentary turbulence, tilting at least forty degrees from the horizontal, and just when it seemed the rough patch had run its course, the machine became rocked by less intense, but continuous winds that only seemed to be increasing in strength.

_ THIS DISTURBANCE WOULD BE NO OBSTACLE FOR BATTRA, BUT THE CONSTRUCT HAS ITS LIMITS. PERHAPS THIS VENTURE HAS RUN ITS COURSE. _

Masako would’ve agreed, had her eyes not then spotted, through the obscuring fog, the nonetheless distinctive bright white of a ship’s hull.

_Wait. There!_

It was gone in seconds, a thicker layer of mist shielding the object from view, but Masako had enough of a heading to go on. She brought the Battra zord lower, the haze clearing away the deeper she ventured, until finally, the ship revealed itself.

As did the immense, rocky coastal mountainside it had somehow been thrown upon by the storm.

It was far enough away that she didn’t have to worry about crashing, but her hands still gripped tighter on the controls for several seconds at the shock of the large, formerly hidden landmass that she hadn’t had any inkling of moments earlier.

The boat was larger than the standard fishing vessel, but not by much, and from a cursory glance, it had no clear signs of any fishing equipment mounted to what was left of the deck. _What was left_ , because the white-hulled ship had been broken into at least three pieces, likely in the same incident responsible for it now being stranded, landlocked, two hundred meters above sea level on a creviced stone ledge above a sheer cliff face.

_ THAT ISLAND… _

Masako had still been wrapping her head around the boat when Battra’s ominous words bowled through her thoughts. _The island? What’s so special about the island? What is it?_

_ FOR SOME OF US, IT WAS HOME. _

_Wait, you mean…_

It was a wide island with many peaks, possibly part of a chain if the more distant ones had water between them, though the central peak stood high above all. The surface was darkened by the pouring rain, almost as if it had been raining here for far longer than the past several minutes Masako had experienced it, but a large portion of the visible surface was populated by dense vegetation. Relatively small, unnatural structures that had at first appeared like radio or cell towers, were in fact built more like immense stadium lights, spaced far apart in the gaps between the taller mountain peaks. By now, they were falling clearly into disrepair, with most stripped of their checkerboard protective plating and several almost completely toppled.

Far below the shipwreck, in a small, seaside rocky cavern near the chopped waterline, several sand-red tentacles coiled closer to the body of a giant octopus even larger than the one Masako had watched devour the boat, this one attempting to squeeze itself into the gap to protect itself from the strength of the churning waves.

_Monster Island._

There was still fog and storming winds all around, enclosing the hovering Battra zord in a cyclone-like tunnel that rendered the island visible but nothing else, aside from the immediate sea below.

_ IT COULD BE AN OLD WRECK. _

_No, look at the split trees, the minor landslides around it. That spot’s freshly disturbed._

_ AN UNFORTUNATE VESSEL CAUGHT IN THE STORM. _

“And thrown _two whole Godzillas_ high in the air?” Masako couldn’t help but state aloud. “Face it, Battra, there is a _mystery_ on _Monster Island_ , are we really gonna just leave this alone?”

  


* * *

  


The bolt of red lighting deposited Masako on the rain-soaked ledge, where she was careful to keep her footing. She found herself grateful that the ranger armor acted as a seal against the elements, and walked through the continuing downpour with little in the way of discomfort. With no guarantee it could keep aloft in the storm, and in lieu of hoping for a safe landing site, the Battra zord converted itself back into red energy and struck downward into the depths of the sea.

_ WHAT IS IT YOU HOPE TO FIND HERE? _

_A really, really big safe filled with diamonds_ , Masako thought with a smirk. _Maybe some rare earth metals, a complete Spinosaurus skeleton, a physical backup of Geocities, the last Mark Cerasini novel… I’d probably settle for a whaler who died in a really funny way, to be honest._

They’d made it to site of the wreck, and… it was a _mess_. Pieces of metal strewn about everywhere, and much more damage to the trees and hillside than should have been caused by the boat’s impact alone. On closer inspection, the disturbances in all cases seemed to have been largely caused by sets of parallel, tearing claws. The culprit didn’t remain a question for long after that, as the crash site was also littered with wiry and rain-disheveled, but nonetheless brilliantly red _feathers_ , each of them at least as long as Masako was tall.

_ THERE, MYSTERY SOLVED. AN OOKONDORU ATTACKED THE VESSEL AND BROUGHT IT HERE. _

Masako paused at that, eyes narrowing.

_Maybe… but what’s got you so worked up, anyways? You’ve been freaking out about this the whole time, were you… were you here when…_

_ I WAS NEVER INTERRED HERE, NOR DID I RESIDE ON THIS ISLAND FOR ANY EXTENDED TIME EVEN WITHOUT THE DEFENSES. I WAS ACQUIRED ELSEWHERE. _

_Then what’s wrong?_

_ BEING HERE PRESENTS AN UNCALCULATED RISK, WITH NO PREDETERMINED REWARD. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE PURPOSE. _

Wandering into the open interior of the ship, scanning through what was still intact enough to search, Masako arched an eyebrow. _Are you worried about me?_

Her mental image of Battra looked offended. _WHAT CONCERNS ME IS THE UNJUSTIFIED THREAT TO AN AGREEABLE HOST, OR THE POSSIBILITY THAT MY POWER COIN MAY SIMPLY BE LOST HERE AND NEVER RECOVERED. I AM YET TO SENSE A WORTHWHILE REASONING._

_You’re in my head. You already know what I’m thinking._

_ AND THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THERE IS EVIDENCE HERE. _

_But if it’s anywhere, Monster Island is as good a place to start looking, and if there’s even a chance we can figure it all out… the coins, the rangers… I still don’t know why you’re not more on board with this._

Battra fell silent, and Masako figured that was just as well. The shipwreck offered little insight into her _immediate_ investigation, other than the lack of bodies and the conspicuous presence of several detailed maps of Monster Island. The former suggested the crew had either escaped, been eaten, or some mixture of the two, and the latter proved that whoever was on board had come here intentionally, looking for the island instead of being slammed against it coincidentally.

Monster Island had been abandoned for almost twenty years, at least officially. The fact someone was seeking it out _now_ caught Masako’s undivided attention. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to do some more looking around, see if anyone did survive after all.

And if they did, they certainly had some explaining to do.

  


* * *

  


What Masako had determined to be the most obvious route away from the crash site, was a narrow, descending ravine traveling farther inland, like a deep crack opening directly into the face of the mountain. The path below her feet was a steep slope of loose, finely-crumbled rock, the smallest pieces resembling gravel.

Mist from both rain, and audible rushing water somewhere below partially obscured the path ahead, but it was clear the opening curved gradually to the right, and dropped enough in elevation that it might very well have reached sea level again at the bottom. Though every surface of stone was colored darker by the wash of rain, as Masako carefully navigated downward, she found that the rock fragments near the flattening-out bottom of the hill were rounder, like pebbles, eroded by far more frequent exposure to water.

The mist was denser in the valley, a space wider than the initial ravine and seemingly acting as an intersection with other paths between sheer rocky cliffs. Waterfalls, no doubt strengthened by the downpour, dropped hundreds of meters to a pebbled ground that parted the flowing streams like a permeable, easily-rearranged delta.

And something was moving through the fog ahead.

Masako dropped to a knee behind a larger, boulder-sized, oval-shaped stone, her left shoulder against the smooth rock as she matched her line of sight to the top surface.

There were sounds, now. The shifting of pebbles under larger, heavier feet. The croaking, almost purr-like, internal fluid adjustment of a stomach jostled on walking limbs. A wild, ear-piercing shriek that cried out in a sudden spasm but quieted the very next moment, only to repeat the process as the shadow moved closer.

Two limbs – only two that connected to the ground, but with elbow-bends instead of knee-bends. Horizontal posture, with a long, whip-like tail that intermittently counterbalanced and dragged behind it. Narrowing, crocodilian jaws, with a more consistent silhouette than the shifting muscle on the rest of the creature, possibly the result of increased armor in that area. Approximately four meters in height, if distance could be judged accurately, and at least three times that in length.

“Skull-crawler,” a voice whispered, which surprised Masako because it was a _very_ different intonation than Battra’s. “Keep quiet. It’s been screaming like that for twenty minutes, I don’t think it actually knows we’re here.”

Masako spent the next several, tense minutes processing the fact that another person was sharing her cover, with the mist between them thick enough she could only see a vague silhouette even less than a meter apart.

The skull-crawler wandered aimlessly, but didn’t approach. Instead, it scooped its jaws down into a gap in the rocks at its feet, retrieving a plump, bulbous, almost pillow-like object with several stubby, pointed limbs. It threw the shape about several times to get the best grip around it, then swallowed the thing whole, letting out another screech the moment its throat was clear again.

“I’m moving in for a clearer shot,” the voice whispered, a focused intensity twinged with just the hint of _excitement_.

“I’ll cover you,” Masako spoke at low volume, in case the ranger helmet filter startled her mysterious companion.

The lithe, readying silhouette seemed to pause for a moment, but shook off the oddity she’d almost managed to properly notice, drawing her weapon and chancing a low crawl toward a position closer to the two-legged reptile.

Whatever she was holding, it certainly seemed _small_ for something meant to deal any damage to a thick-skinned, partially-armored reptile over twice her height, but since there was a chance both ranger and alien weapons were potentially on the table, Masako withheld her inherent skepticism for the moment.

The silhouette stopped behind another rock, aiming the object in her hands and lining up her shot. In fact, it seemed like lining up her shot was the _only_ thing she was doing, as almost a full minute passed without any weapons fire. Even only a few meters away now, she seemed frustrated, lowering the device and messing around with some type of target-assist panel…

Masako sighed, the exerting becoming a low groan as she quietly voiced her frustration aloud.

“That’s a fucking _camera_ , isn’t it?”

It might have been her own quiet words, or some other sound or movement the other girl had made, but the next thing Masako knew, the skull-crawler was raging again with purpose, and her mysterious companion was shouting _RUN!_ as she barreled back through the fog.

Masako ran, too, if only to head off the move of running back to fetch her the other girl was making. They split the difference, angling to Masako’s right and the other girl’s left and converging in a direction that seemed to be toward clearer skies.

The ground beneath Masako’s boots changed quickly from rounded stones to shallow water, interrupted repeatedly by what felt like large, spongy hills. It was only as the fog cleared to a gentle haze that she both processed the nature of the new terrain, and identified the object the skull-crawler had eaten prior to seeking out its current prey.

 _Sea stars_ , the kind that were more plump than spindly, each between two and five meters across and crowding the rock-bottom shallows so densely that the points of their legs intruded into the gaps of others more often than not. The water was scarcely a few inches deep, rendering most of the creatures’ soft, pale orange bodies above the surface.

Farther out to Masako’s left, the other girl was visible in the open, moving swiftly with purpose on her brown, practical running shoes. Her neat, black hair was cut at a sharp, inclined angle, the lower points at the front reaching shoulder-length. She wore an army-green T-shirt, khaki shorts, some kind of brown, sleeveless, open-front jacket that acted more as back protection than anything, and had a dark red backpack slung over her shoulders. She leapt almost expertly from one sea star to the next, a small, orange camcorder still clutched securely in her grasp.

Still mostly in the thicker fog, the skull-crawler was in close pursuit.

Phasing red and leaping through a bolt of red lightning, Masako reappeared on the sea star the other girl had just leapt from, facing down the reptile and unfolding her coat into the four sections of Battra’s wings. Splayed in the air behind her like leaves of a clover, the sheaths of fiber charged with energy just as her outstretched arms did the same.

From Masako’s hands and wingtips, a storm of Battra’s red lightning rained sideways on the skull-crawler, striking into its opened mouth and launching it backward off its feat. In the clouded air around it, it writhed its crocodilian head skyward, darker smoke pouring from between its silhouetted jaws, then turned fully away into a stumbling, choking retreat.

Masako’s coat fell back around the rest of her ranger armor as she rounded, finding the other girl still running clear toward the end of the shallows. They’d fled into a steep, coastal ravine, with hundreds to thousands more of the overgrown sea stars crowding the vertical, rock walls on either side with the same packed density.

Set in the middle of the gap at the far end, was an angled, but overall mushroom-shaped piece of bright yellow machinery the size of a two-story home, its paint faded with age. When functional, it would have released a cloud of sensory gases to dissuade kaiju from leaving the island, but like the other artificial structures on the island, it had fallen into obvious disrepair.

Masako bolted ahead again, resolidifying in-step with the other girl as they both approached the remains of the gas emitter. “It’s gone,” she voiced aloud, both of them slowing to a splashing stop in the ankle-deep water between several of the starfish.

The girl had turned around quickly, staring long into the fog of the inland waterfalls before she was satisfied the creature had indeed retreated. She let out a relieved, whistling exhale, and finally started a turn toward Masako.

“Heck of a close one, wasn’t it—” Her eyes were wide, blinking. “…Battra?”

Masako crossed her arms, tilting her helmet with an invisibly arched brow.

“I mean, obviously not _Battra_ , just… a person dressed like Battra. For some reason.” Recoiling with an almost fearful cringe, she seemed to roll that thought over in her head for a while before it clicked. “Oh, you’re a ranger, aren’t you?”

Masako didn’t miss the way her enthusiasm waned, replaced with something almost like disappointment or disapproval.

“Yep.” Masako confirmed.

The girl thought to herself another moment, then settled to a near-scowling, stern focus.

“So, you have Battra’s powers, right? And you used them on the skull-crawler? _Can_ you help me find the rest of my team?”

There was a begrudging acceptance of necessity, but unexpected collectedness, from this… by her outfit, Masako would have said _tourist_ , but by her actions, she could probably stand to upgrade that assessment just a little.

“I _can_ , if you tell me why you’re so interested in Monster island,” Masako bartered. “Let me guess, investigative journalist?”

“Megazoologist,” the girl corrected. The slightest bit of warmth passed back onto her face, an offer of peace in her considering, brown eyes. A three-pronged shark’s tooth hung from her neck on a length of black cord, and in greeting, she held out the one free hand that wasn’t still holding the treasured camcorder in a vice. “Lucy Casprell.”

“Battra ranger,” Masako deadpanned, her arms still crossed.

“Really?” Lucy crossed her own arms in turn, looking more amused than offended. “Can’t even give me a name?”

“I don’t trust you yet,” Masako said, internally wincing that she’d added the _yet_ without thinking. She told herself it was only because Lucy had said she was a scientist, and that inherently meant she was probably worthwhile.

Lucy seemed about to call her out, but relented. “We need to hurry. If you want the story, you’ll get it on the way.”

She backed up to the edge of the small clearing of water and climbed up one of the larger starfish, the creature lazily flopping one if its legs into the air as she ascended. Hands to her mouth, Lucy called out into the surrounding ravine.

“Professor? Kristina? Is _anyone_ out here?” She tried several more times, focusing specifically on the direction of the gas emitter, and let the echoes last a few more seconds after that before dropping her arms in frustration. She leapt back down, and started at a determined, but clearly exhausted pace back down the ravine toward the waterfalls.

Even as Masako fell in step, Lucy couldn’t seem to help her repeated, amazed glances at the sea-star-packed walls of rock rising up around them.

“ _Pisaster gigas_ ,” Lucy recited, eyes lighting up at their sheer multitudes. “They were bred here, as a self-replicating food source for the kaiju that needed physical sustenance. It looks like they’ve gone unchecked without so many of their usual predators.”

_They do sort of look appealing, I can see it. Ever tried one?_

_ BATTRA IS AMONG THOSE THAT DO NOT REQUIRE SUSTENANCE. _

“Is that why you’re here?” Masako snarked aloud, “To study some starfish?”

“And a whole, upended ecosystem left unchecked for nearly two decades,” Lucy countered. “I’m with Professor Ando’s Kaiju Investigation Team, we’re here to record what we can figure has happened in all that time, and document whatever’s left of the megafauna. There were always a few species here that weren’t quite on the radar when the others were taken.”

The way she talked about the kaiju, it was already pretty clear why she had a problem with rangers.

“…I don’t know how it happened either,” Masako said quietly. “Neither does Battra. We’re still trying to figure that all out.”

Lucy stopped.

Masako looked at her oddly, registering the turning gears visible through skeptical, but reconsidering eyes.

“Do you have Battra’s memories?” Lucy asked slowly.

“Not unless they’re… what was it… ‘ _actively on the surface_.’” Masako reconsidered only a little teasingly, chin resting on a curved finger. “Or wait, that’s only on my end. Not by default at least, I don’t think.”

Lucy’s eyes were wide now, fists clenched as if to hold in the overwhelming hope and awe beneath the surface. “Do _YOU_ … have a telepathic link with Battra?”

_ I CAN SEE LITTLE TO BE GAINED FROM REVEALING SUCH INFORMATION. I WOULD CATEGORIZE IT AS GREATLY UNWISE. _

Masako smiled beneath her helmet.

“Battra says no.”

Lucy quite nearly _screamed_ , leaping in place until another thought occurred to her. “Wait, is it the same for _all_ the rangers?”

_Well, she’s certainly warming up to the idea of rangers, at least a little._

“I…” Masako paused, processing the question for the first time. “I’ve kind of been _assuming_ so, but the guardian moths could always be a special case, with their inherent powers. The other rangers and I don’t exactly _talk_ , so…”

“Wait…” Lucy paused again, remembering to keep walking again with a slight look of guilt as she mentally worked through her point. “Do you just… _live here_ , or something? Is that why you were on the island already?”

“Nope, saw the crash from the air. Landed here to investigate, ended up hiding from that skull-crawler, and then you were talking to me and I kind of went with it. I thought those things were only on _Skull_ island.”

“They were,” Lucy confirmed. “But they travel underground, could have migrated here for the food source. Or it could be a new subspecies. Red-speckled skull-crawler?”

“…did it have red speckles?"

“I think so,” Lucy pondered, starting to open her camera as if to review the footage, but thinking better of it. “Or it just got wrapped up by an Oodako recently. Those suckers are nasty—like, the suckers on their tentacles, _anatomically_ , not…”

“I’m sure the giant octopi took no offense to the coarse language.”

Lucy sighed, but gave Masako a _look_. “Let’s just get going. If I have to stay in this rain any longer than I have to, I’m gonna freeze!”

They made it through the steam cast by the waterfalls. Masako had kept careful watch for the skull-crawler, or any more of its kind, but none showed their bone-white faces during the tense moments the two humans had their visibility hindered beneath the vaporous shroud.

On exit, they chose another rocky, ravine-bottom slope – this one leading upward, out of the coastal rock formations and into the island’s interior. The rock wall on the right side had an overhang at the very top, leaving a rare dry spot along the formation’s base that Lucy gratefully used as a respite from the weather.

“So, what’s Battra like?”

Masako considered the words, and the clear, excitable curiosity Lucy clearly couldn’t help.

_ KEEP IN MIND, I AM STILL LISTENING. _

“Edgy,” Masako began with a smirk that she was pretty sure also carried into her voice. “Edgy like you wouldn’t _believe_ , but it’s not like I’m innocent of that, either. We match each other, in a weird way. He tells me which people we should kill, I tell him which people we probably _shouldn’t_ kill.”

Lucy was quiet for a bit. “That’s… a _joke_ , right?”

“How much do you know about Battra?”

“…Right,” Lucy mumbled awkwardly. “Kinda sorry I asked, then.”

There was quiet for a while, but remarkably, it didn’t last.

“I never really got to see, like, an _actual_ kaiju. I wasn’t even old enough to remember them at the time, just the footage from back then. I know they were all… destructive, sometimes on purpose, even the ones that were ultimately on our side. It’s just how they _were_ , being giant monsters and all. Battra was a protector, wasn’t he?”

“Of the Earth, not people,” Masako corrected, an index finger in the air. “Easy mistake to make.”

“I know, but… he had a change of heart in the end, helped Mothra against Godzilla. Didn’t it stick?”

Masako felt the grumble in the back of her head, telling her this wasn’t a subject to be talked about, but she already kind of knew that. “I don’t think it did,” she said simply, and with finality.

Lucy seemed to know not to pry beyond that, but shrugged away her saddened mood. “Our emergency plan was to head for any of the kaiju control structures. They all usually had some kind of access hatch for maintenance.”

The pieces fit together, to Masako’s surprise. “Is that why you ran for the gas emitter?”

Lucy nodded. “I figured, if the opening to the sea was as big as I thought it was, there would have to be one, right? And I was pretty sure I recognized that ravine from my research, anyway. Kamoebas got stuck down there once, and they had to airlift him out!”

Lucy had managed a bit of a smile at that, and Masako would admit she did too. Especially once she’d mentally pictured the rock turtle’s bulky, armored shell wedged between the cliff faces, his extendable neck probably still able to reach the bottom to happily gulp down sea stars. She was pretty sure she even heard Battra _laugh_ , but it was distant enough she might have imagined it.

She was stirred from her thoughts by a faint, but carrying voice from farther up the slope, and immediately snapped to attention.

“…Lucy, is that you?” the voice repeated, high-pitched and uncertain.

Masako had to quickly move to keep up as Lucy broke out into a run, exerting only the minimum amount of caution absolutely necessary as she ascended the crumbled stone.

High up on the cliff to the right of the passage was one of the stadium-light-style structures, and Masako would admit she hadn’t known quite enough about the island to tell whether it was once a simple light source, or had acted as part of the sonic containment barrier. Either way, enough of its support tower had been torn away that it couldn’t possibly still serve its function.

But directly below it, halfway down the sheer cliff face it was built upon, was a small, square opening likely used for access by helicopter, and much farther below _that_ , at the ground level of the slope, was a scarcely visible, human-sized metal door frame set into the rock. Two people were hanging half-in, half-out of the entrance, waving urgently.

Lucy reached them first, jogging to a stop on the squared-off stone that acted as a partial step-up to the doorway. The girl who had called out had light brown hair that flared outward to points before reaching shoulder-length, and behind her was a darker-skinned boy dressed in green. Both greeted her with lightly-placed hands on her arms and shoulders, helping her into the small hallway set into the cliff face.

Masako had reached the entrance, when, inside, Lucy broke away from the others to look around. It was a darker space than even the clouded island, lit only from the doorway, but a metal frame staircase was visible in the back, likely leading to the upper sections of the access station. Lucy turned back around, casting hopeful and pleading eyes on the others.

“Is anyone else…”

“No, just us,” the brunette said, solemn and apologetic as Lucy’s heart visibly sank in disappointment. “Sorry.”

Lucy breathed, then in an instant, became suddenly mortified, eyes widening in guilt and realization. She pulled the brunette immediately into a tight and desperate hug, tears falling as she sobbed through the other girl’s moment of stunned surprise and quiet reciprocation.

“Gotcha, Mars,” Lucy whimpered softly. “I’m _so_ glad you’re okay, it’s just—"

“I know,” the girl called Mars answered just as quietly, hesitantly resting her head on Lucy’s shoulder and crying silently until they broke apart.

“You too, Kyle,” Lucy stumbled through, still wiping at her eyes.

Kyle was staring, concerned and visibly defensive, back down the hall toward where Masako knew her suit was silhouetted in the light, probably over-dramatically.

Wait, no… the eyes, horns, and arm-spikes _glowed_. It was _definitely_ over-dramatic. She heard a distant bolt of lightning from somewhere behind her, and audibly _sighed_.

“Oh, she’s with me,” Lucy reassured, a hand over Kyle’s shoulder. “This is… the Battra ranger!”

The introduction was inevitably awkward, but Kyle did seem to relax just a bit, even if he was clearly still a little bit on guard. “I’m gonna trust you on this, cause we don’t really have a choice,” he said, his face slipping back to an easy smile as he moved against the wall and made space for Masako to enter.

Masako leant against the wall opposite him, crossing her arms, but slowly dropped to a kneel when the other three sat down to rest. Masako wondered whether she really was too used to her ranger strength, as the others took relaxing breaths and began to discuss amongst themselves.

“I had eyes on everyone at the beginning,” Kyle admitted, sounding oddly guilt-ridden as he recounted the events to Lucy. “We all cleared the first gap, away from the condor, but I saw the professor stumble on the rocks. Jason had him up quick, with Shannon taking his other shoulder. They drifted left, and then you, Kristina, Shawn, and Jeremy looked like you were grouping up off to the right, but when we got to the fog, I started losing people. Then the skull-crawler showed up, and… Mars was the only one left I could see, so I grabbed on to her and _ran_.”

“It’s not your fault,” Mars assured quietly, tapping Kyle along the upper arm and looking a lot like it wasn’t the first time she’d had to say it.

“I didn’t see anyone else,” Lucy said, lowering her gaze and seeming somehow even more distraught. “After the skull-crawler it was just me by the waterfalls, until she showed up.” She directed a lazy elbow at Masako.

“Our phones and radios aren’t working either,” Mars added with a frown, but a tiny bit of faux reassurance. “Something with this storm. The others are probably fine, just hiding out in more of these access places. We just have to find them, and then…”

“And then what?” Lucy questioned in challenge, though it wasn’t harsh. “We’re _really_ down a boat at the moment, and I doubt there’d be another one left here, after all that time the monsters had this place to themselves.”

Mars turned to eye Masako fearfully, but curiously. “Could you fly us out of here?”

“I do have a zord, and it does fly,” Masako confirmed with reservation, “but you just said way more names than I have room for in the cockpit. If we could find some container, like a vehicle or a bunch of nets, I could probably carry you…”

“In _this_ weather?” Kyle questioned. “I don’t think we should chance it, even with a zord. Anything that goes up now is gonna get shredded by those winds, or pelted with lightning, and that’s if the _condor_ doesn’t get to it first.”

“It shouldn’t even be flying in this weather, that much water in its feathers messes up its thermal regulation,” Lucy pointed out, a look of puzzlement crossing her face before she shook herself out of it and turned to Masako. “do you have any way to call for help?”

Masako’s immediate answer was _no_ , but the more she thought about it…

“Okay so _technically_ … I do have access to a zord-to-zord communication channel, _but_ I don’t know the range on it, or whether the Rangers can even get the message if they’re not in their zords, too. And if they _are_ in their zords, they’ll probably be in the middle of a battle and won’t be able to help, and on top of all that, there’s only a fifty-fifty shot they believe me, anyways.”

In a sea of strange looks, it was Mars who asked, “Why wouldn’t they believe you?”

“…We’re not exactly friends.”

“There still might be a working comm tower,” Lucy cut in, the interruption seeming an intentional topic change. “The main hubs were always more protected, mostly underground. It’s a long shot, but it might be a powerful enough signal to get through this weather.”

“So, we find the professor, gather everyone, and then make for one of these hubs,” Kyle surmised, nodding along with the plan, before turning to Masako. “And if that doesn’t work, we can try your communication channel thing.”

“So, how long should we wait to see if this rain clears up any?” Mars asked, looking worriedly out at the storm.

At that moment, though, the sound of rain grew less harsh, the light from the entrance almost seeming brighter. Curiosity peaked, the others all made moves to stand. Masako moved to the doorway, and indeed, the storm had calmed overhead, though it still seemed to be raging on other parts of the island.

“Still no signal,” Mars said, frowning again, as she stared frustratedly at her pastel pink cell phone.

“But the rain’s light enough,” Lucy declared. “Let’s get going.”

  


* * *

  


As Lucy and Kyle drifted to the front of the group, engaged in pooling their collective knowledge of the island layout and their team’s established emergency planning, Masako found herself in the back of the very short line, walking next to the brunette.

“Mars?” She asked quietly, not actually sure whether she wanted to get the girl’s attention or simply wanted an explanation on the name.

“Oh,” the girl chuckled a nervous laugh, but played it off with a wave. “It’s Marcia. Marcia _Marshall_ ,” she groaned with emphasis. “Ever since I told Lucy how much I hated it, she’s been coming up with nicknames instead. That one’s just stuck for a while.”

Masako considered that, retreading the tone of the admission a few times and trying to reconcile it with Mars, or Marcia’s appearance. She wore a light, sky-blue top with lace at the short sleeves, a thin, dark teal fabric choker, several wristbands and hair ties on her right wrist, and a pink hairclip in the same shade as her phone.

Still, Masako spoke at lowered volume. “Is there… another way you want me to talk about you, or…”

The brunette blinked a few times, her eyes widening in surprise but a smile forming soon after, small and amusedly fond. “Oh, no, it actually _is_ just the name, and only when it’s my full name, really. It just gets annoying sometimes! Don’t worry about it, though, Kristina’s asked me that same question three times already.”

She paused, then, seemingly alarmed at her own words, and cast a nervous glance ahead toward Lucy and Kyle. Seemingly satisfied that whoever she’d been concerned about hadn’t noticed what she’d been worried about them noticing, she dropped to a whisper.

“Probably shouldn’t mention… until we _find_ her, I mean,” she half-assured worriedly.

They exited into a wider, somewhat grassy, fern-covered plain, though much of the terrain was still loose dirt and immense boulders that might appear like normal rocks next to a kaiju. Jagged mountain peaks rose to either side with only small, infrequent gaps between, creating what could be at least a two-way giant monster walking path that curved around to the right the farther into the distance it went.

There was the twisted-off base of another stadium light on a nearby ridge to the left, the rest of the tower now a crushed mess of metal frame resting on the valley floor. Sure enough, there was another helicopter entrance directly below the standing remnant, and a well-hidden but discernable doorway set into the vegetated, angled slope at the foot of the cliff.

A screech from overhead made the traveling group freeze. It was only a moment, and they ran for the cover of a group of trees against the mountainside.

An Ookondoru soared into view, its ruffled and untidy, crimson feathers fluttering in the heavy winds while its immense wingspan remained static and outstretched in a glide. From the black, slightly-hooked beak at the end of a rounded head and moderately long neck, it screeched again, but made no move to dive toward, or even look down at the valley.

“I don’t think this one sees us either,” Lucy whispered.

“It sounds angry,” Marcia added at a similar volume, shaking with unease.

“Probably from the rain, right?” Kyle reasoned, then looked to Lucy for confirmation.

“…Maybe,” said Lucy, seeming unsure. “Something doesn’t feel right, though…”

The condor circled a few times, until its drift on the wind carried it away from the valley, its intermittent, violent cries growing more distant.

“Let’s hurry,” Lucy decided on instead, turning her attention to the doorway farther along the border of the valley.

It was a short journey through the rain-soaked ground, and their footprints weren’t the first to have left imprints in the mud.

Backed cautiously into the shadow of the doorway, even with the large ferns limiting line of sight on either side, a girl with long, brown hair and a medium tan skin tone cautiously waved the others in, wide eyes toward the sky.

“Shannon!” Lucy greeted, this time with an immediate hug that the other girl also seemed surprised to receive.

“ _Dios_ , you’re alright!” Shannon gasped, eyes passing to the others with hope and silent thanks before widening again as they found Masako. “In here, quickly,” she urged, rather than make note of the stranger, though her eyes remained wary.

It was another narrow hallway, but in the back, near the staircase, a heavier-built guy with rectangle-frame glasses and a full, blond beard and ponytail had set up a portable lamp on the third stair. He also had a medical kit, and was currently applying a bandage to the injured leg of an older, white-haired Japanese man, also with rectangle-frame glasses.

“Professor Ando!” Lucy called out, moving quickly towards the two in the back – three, actually, as another boy was resting in the shadows further up the stairs, with a dull blue shirt, a messenger bag slung over one shoulder, neatly-styled black hair, and a face Masako instinctively wanted to punch for some reason.

“Lucy?” Professor Ando sat up as the others moved further into the hall, Lucy settling beside him and taking his arm for support. “Oh, Lucy, thank heavens you’re safe. Who else is with you?”

He adjusted his glasses and looked over the others, and either he didn’t notice Masako at all, or actually had no discernable reaction to her presence, which was just a bit unsettling.

Lucy was looking around as well, as if double-checking the population of the shelter with futile hope. “That makes… almost everyone,” she said, with a bleak smile but a still clearly tortured heart as her face fell. “How’s he doing, Jason?” she asked ponytail guy, latching on to the present matter of the Professor Ando’s injury.

“He won’t be running anytime soon,” Jason reported with a frown, “but it isn’t as bad as we all thought. He should be fine, as long as we can avoid any more surprises.” He didn’t seem at all confident in the chances of that condition’s fulfillment.

“It seems we may yet consider ourselves fortunate,” Professor Ando spoke up again. “The storm has let up?” he questioned until Lucy nodded, then added, turning to Masako with an arched brow, “and who is our esteemed guest? Care to introduce yourself?”

The eyes that weren’t on Masako before, all were now, with differing levels of uneasiness.

Beneath her horned helmet, Masako rolled her eyes. “Clearly, I’m the Gorosaurus ranger.” She brought up her hands, threading a few cackles of red, electrical energy between her splayed fingers.

“Either way…” the professor noted with a small chuckle, “I suppose we all have your thanks. I suspect your help here must go quite against your monster’s nature.”

Masako was taken aback. “Well… you’re scientists, aren’t you? Your work helps protect the Earth, and no matter the field, you have an appreciation most humans don’t.”

It was Professor Ando’s turn to be somewhat surprised by the words. “I see. Our intentions here _were_ to study the long-term effects of the monsters’ departure from the ecosystem. You give us far more credit than we’d claim, and in truth, the minds of those in power will always be resistant to the truth we seek to convey, but it is our earnest dedication to do what we can to preserve this planet we all call home.”

_See, Battra? Scientists. They’re important. We have to save them._

_ …BATTRA HAS SAID NOTHING. WHOM ARE YOU TRYING TO CONVINCE? _

If that thought gave Masako pause, she had little time to reflect on it, as she soon heard other voices, too faint to be from those in the room. The professor and the other students seemed to pick up on the commotion as well, all holding still and quiet to listen.

“…see, there! Footprints. Looks like it could be more than five distinct sets!”

The pace of a trek through the mud increased in hurried speed, and it wasn’t long before another figure rounded into the light of the doorway.

The student wore a light grey jacket, a darker grey backpack slung over his shoulders. His black hair could be described as ‘sharp’ all around, from the slightly-ruffled spikes above his forehead to the point of his goatee. His glasses were sharper rectangles, catching the light from Jason’s portable lamp as he meticulously took in the sight of all the others with dawning relief.

“Shawn!” Shannon called out, pulling the new arrival into a half-hug that the boy resisted initially, but ultimately was able to relax into without diverting his attention.

Arriving close behind Shawn was yet another student, her searching eyes far more expressive as she stopped abruptly with a hand on the wall for balance. In only seconds, she exhaled the breath she probably shouldn’t have been holding, a bleak, grateful smile crossing her face.

The girl wore a dark grey tank top with a light blue, denim jacket overtop, the sleeves torn off and several multicolored buttons pinned to either side of the collar. Matching blue shorts were layered over metallic purple leggings, stylistically torn in places. Her boots rose almost to her knees, rubbery black and fastened to her calves with three heavy buckles each. The bands on both her wrists were black and studded in silver spikes, a match for the choker around her neck. Her hair, including her eyebrows, was dyed neon pink, the left side shaved fully to a buzz-cut and the right side falling down her face to only chin-length at the longest. Her visible left ear had round piercings on the lobe and in the top curve, with two rings around the rear edge, and the other ornaments spread across her face included round studs above and below the outer point of each eyebrow, another centered at the lower edge of black-dyed lips, and a ring around the left side of her nose. Her blue eyes approached a lighter shade with hints of cyan, and—

_ I BELIEVE A CONVERSATION HAS STARTED. _

_…Oh. Uh, thanks._

“—nothing, really! I just slipped and fell on the rocks,” the pink-haired girl – possibly Kristina, if Masako was remembering the names correctly – explained, trying to hide the bloodied scuff on her elbow that Lucy had nonetheless found.

“She didn’t fall.” Shawn said simply, but with fire. His focused eyes had found face-punch kid at the back of the room, and weren’t letting up their scornful glare.

Lucy had followed his gaze in an instant, and looked back at the injured girl, eyes severe. When she spoke, it was a command, not a question.

“Kristina, _what happened_.”

“Like she said, she slipped and fell on some rocks!” Face-punch kid tried, unsuccessfully, to smooth over with a confident smile.

“I _saw what you did_ , Jeremy.” Shawn insisted.

“He probably didn’t mean it, he was just running and we… ran into each other,” Kristina placated, and by her eyes, Masako could see what she was trying to do, but Lucy clearly wasn’t going to take that for an answer, her eyes now joining Shawn’s again in Jeremy’s interrogation.

“ _You_ pushed her down, she could’ve _died_.”

“What the _hell_ , Jeremy!”

“Hey, if she got in my way, it’s not _my_ fault—"

Masako’s glare had found Jeremy as well, though it was only brief. With a sigh, she put up her hands and stepped out to act as a solid wall between the furious students.

“Okay, okay, I _get_ it. This, is the part of the movie, where you all get mad at each other, and start making stupid decisions, so _can we not?_ ”

At the firm words, there was a prolonged silence, with only the rain from outside and the distant screeches of several skull-crawlers drawing the group back to reality. When the quiet broke, it was Jason, shuffling over to Lucy and Kristina with some of his medical equipment in hand. “I should probably take a look at that.”

Masako caught a glance at Jeremy’s pleased smirk.

_You know, I really, really want to snap his neck, but I’m guessing that wouldn’t go over well._

“Kristina and I located one of the Island’s hub stations, out through a mountain pass in the other wall of the valley,” Shawn began explaining, begrudgingly. “It’s a smaller one, and we didn’t have a prolonged chance to look it over, but there may be some more equipment we can use.”

“Then, that would be our best option, at the moment,” Ando approved with a nod.

Jason’s eyes found Masako. “With the professor like this, it’ll be a long walk. Cover us, if we run into trouble?”

“If it gets us out of here sooner, sure. I’ll fry anything that gets too close.”

The two new arrivals now seemed to direct their interest Masako’s way. It was the pink-haired girl that held out a hand. “Kristina Sumres. Your coat’s pretty rad.”

Tensing only slightly, she shook Kristina’s hand, thankful her face was covered. “Uh… Masako.”

_ VERY SMOOTH. _

_…What are you talking ab—wait._

_Shit._

Behind Kristina, Lucy arched a telling brow. “So, you trust us now?”

Even in her flustered state, Masako noticed the way Kristina had found Lucy’s side immediately upon backing away, their hands clasped together with reassuring firmness in a silent, passionate communication the two tried to keep subtle from the rest of the group.

“Actually… yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  


* * *

  


They kept to the trees again, when they could. The rain now seemed even lighter than it had only minutes earlier, a faint drizzle that barely seemed to wear at the others even while they crossed slowly over open ground.

Hidden between two opposing slopes that overlapped from afar, a narrow field wrapped through the mountains on the right side of the valley, teeming with older-looking trees and once-prehistoric plants that might have escaped trampling even while the island had been the home of titans.

Lucy’s mood had improved markedly, as she happily snapped pictures and recorded footage of several stout plants she had identified as _cycads_ and a taller tree called _stigmaria_. Kristina was always close at her side, at one point guiding her away from a fan of sharp plant leaves that apparently carried a potent toxin.

“So, you’re a power ranger?” an unbothered voice inquired of Masako. It was Shawn, having gravitated to walking quietly at the ranger’s side.

“Yep.”

“And… Battra’s motives exert an influence on your actions? Or the reasoning behind them?”

“…It’s more like we _agree_ most of the time, so it’s easier to work together.”

“Hmm…” Shawn pondered, his gaze briefly drifting to the higher mountains above. “Unlikely that happened at random. Are the other rangers so in line with their kaiju?”

Masako found that an intriguing thought. “I wouldn’t know. I’m not even sure they all have voices in their heads, or if it’s just me. Well, me and Mothra, probably.”

Shawn was in deep thought again, more intently this time. “Does Battra know his top flight speed? How about wingspan in meters? Does he make a cocoon like Mothra? What about an egg? There are a few more gaps in my notes, actually…”

_ BATTRA WILL NOT ENTERTAIN THIS. _

“Well, I _think_ I know the cocoon one,” Masako began, tapping a finger to her faceplate. “It’s more of an energized state, the larva disappears and gets reconstituted into the imago.”

Shawn had taken out an electronic tablet, typing out notes in the shelter of denser vegetation cover overhead. “Interesting. Can he use it to turn back into the larval stage, from the imago form?”

_…Well?_

_ …YES. _

“Yes, Battra goes both ways.”

_ STOP THAT. THEY DON’T KNOW YOU’RE SMILING LIKE THAT, BUT I DO. _

“So, is there ever, technically, a reincarnation process?” Shawn pressed on. “Or is it just a back-and-forth conversion of the same instance?”

_Just give him the answers._

_ FINE. IF MY EARTHLY FORM IS DESTROYED BY OUTSIDE MEANS, MY ESSENCE MUST RECOVER IN THE EGG STATE, BUT MY CONSCIOUSNESS REMAINS THE SAME NO MATTER THE CONDITION OF MY PHYSICAL BEING. THIS IS ALSO TRUE FOR… MOTHRA. CREATING AN EGG OR A LARVA PREMATURELY IS SIMPLY A WAY TO CIRCUMVENT THE RECOVERY PROCESS. GUARDIAN MOTHS ARE ALWAYS ONE ENTITY, EVEN IF SPREAD ACROSS MULTIPLE MANIFESTATIONS AT ONCE. _

Masako relayed the information, though with less grandiosity. Shawn nodded along, cataloguing the information with a look of impressed contemplation. After that, Shawn simply stared at the tablet intently, as if searching for more questions he knew he had, but was struggling to remember in time to ask them.

The smaller valley opened up to a wider stretch of flat land on the coast, ending in a sheer cliff that seemed far closer to water level than the one the boat had been wrecked upon. More mountains on either side sheltered the open ledge with a containing curve, making the space one that had likely been moderately difficult to access by kaiju not capable of flight.

Even still, the hangar entrance that had once been a set of retractable doors in the ground was smashed inward, forming a square hole in the part of the field toward the cliff’s edge. Pieces of the false terrain sloped downward into the pit on both the right and left sides, providing an easy way for the travelers to descend to an artificial garage now full of damaged vehicles.

The bubble-canopy helicopters were all smashed and in pieces, as were the all-terrain 4x4s. There was a single, large transport truck, but it was hopelessly upturned on its side. Passing through the carnage, the group made it to a doorway on the water-facing wall – too small for any kaiju to have passed through, even the newly-arrived skull-crawlers.

Entering the doorway, the first part of the floor was a threshold to a pair of descending staircases on either side, while the rest of the large, singular room extended as a solid floor toward a wide window to the sea on the far side, reinforced with spans of solid titanium forming a grate between the large, rectangular glass panes. There were computer terminals to either side, gated off by small, guiding handrails that formed a perimeter around the central gathering area of the room, which was situated around a large table featuring a scale, topographical depiction of the island itself.

The first thing the group did was filter down the first flight of stairs on either side, finding themselves almost fifty meters off the ground in a large, very-high-ceilinged room beneath the observation deck. The stairwells zig-zagged back and forth, fire-escape style, down to the distant floor, which was at water level and was, in fact, intruded upon by artificial canals between the metal plating around it. There was another grated window letting light in, similar in size to the first and much smaller in comparison to this room as a whole, and water-carrying tunnels in the two forward corners appeared to provide boat access to the outside.

And of course, while the room was clearly designed to accommodate larger vessels, of the kind that could have carried the entire group off the island, there were none to be found in the presently-deserted underground marina.

“Look, over there!”

It was Marcia who’d spotted the small motorboat, stored out of the water and resting on a metal framework in the back right corner of the floor far below. It was barely a two-seater, perhaps three.

“No way that’s big enough,” Kyle observed, shaking his head.

“Still, we could send for help, right?” Marcia continued to press, though her confidence in the solution was fading fast.

“It would take days in something like that,” Jason decided, hand to his chin as he sized up the vehicle from afar. “If the engine lasts, and that’s if the storm doesn’t kick up again. It was probably only meant for maintenance on the island, or passage to and from larger ships that couldn’t get into these docks themselves.”

Slowly, they retreated from the lower chamber, gathering both on the floor and in swivel chairs scattered around the observation room. Jason tried to get one of the terminals online to access any communication equipment, but he seemed to be running into trouble with power.

“Anybody have a generator on hand?”

“Surprised you don’t,” Masako snarked lightly from where she’d begun to mock-brood in a corner, arms crossed.

Shannon spoke up. “Doesn’t Battra make lightning?”

Masako blinked beneath her concealing lenses. “I… would that _work?_ ”

Jason frowned. “Depends on how well you could focus it. There’s a difference between _shocking_ something and applying power to it, you could fry the system if you’re not careful.”

_Well, you’re a god, aren’t you? Can you do that?_

_ IT WOULD BE RELATIVELY SIMPLE TO— _

They all heard it. Distantly, the sound of an engine starting up. Echoing from far below.

Kyle looked around the room, and sighed. “Where’s Jeremy?”

By the noise, the motorboat was already speeding away, so the group rushed to the window instead of the stairs. Sure enough, the small boat left a trail of disturbed wake as it struck out for open water, a single blue-shirted occupant at the controls.

Then, the glass in front of them _hissed_ with incoming wind. They each backed a step away, as in the sea below, the waves became more chaotic, Jeremy’s boat rocking dangerously even against its built momentum. The sky darkened overhead, stormclouds gathering to a strength that rivaled the enclosing torrent the Battra zord had arrived in.

And then they saw it.

Appearing from behind an obscuring, rocky cliff on the rightmost side of the view provided by the window, an immense waterspout moved in, crossing the water far ahead as if on course to intercept the tiny boat. Easily over a hundred meters across, perhaps two hundred, and rising endlessly into the clouded sky, the cyclone continued to drift parallel to the shore, bringing with it the fall of rain and the full fury of the raging tempest.

“Jeremy…” Marcia cried softly, her hands over her mouth in horror.

And then, all eyes were on Masako, most of them pleading – including Lucy’s and Kristina’s.

“… _Fine_.”

Lightning carried her back to the stairwells and down all the way to the floor below, where she sized up the leftmost corridor leading through the rock. Even the water within the compound was agitated, waves splashing over metal decks and walkways.

_Look, I hate the guy’s guts too, but if I let him die intentionally, the rest of them will blame me, and get upset, and trust will break down, and things probably won’t go well from here on out._

_ YOU COULD LET HIM DIE UNINTENTIONALLY. _

_It would still mess the rest of them up pretty bad. They actually care about this asshole._

_ AND YOU WOULD SAVE HIM, BECAUSE THESE OTHERS OF YOUR TRIBE WISH YOU TO? _

_I… guess?_

_ THOSE YOU CARE FOR WILL NOT ALWAYS DEFINE WORTHINESS THE SAME WAY YOU DO. THEY WILL HAVE COMPASSION FOR THOSE THAT DO NOT DESERVE IT. THIS SEEMS, AS HUMANS WOULD SAY, A ‘SLIPPERY SLOPE’ TO CARING ABOUT EVERYONE. ___

__

__Masako sighed, and it was almost a hiss, as she focused on the narrow passage ahead and jumped forward into a bolt of red lightning._ _

____

_Maybe it is._

____

She reappeared with her wings outstretched, gliding over the water in the pouring rain. She knew she wouldn’t last against the winds, but she only needed a fraction of a second to locate Jeremy’s boat, and strike forward once again, materializing in the back seat of a vessel tossed about by cresting waves.

____

“Wha—” Jeremy shouted, turning around with wide, fearful and additionally shocked eyes only for Masako’s arms to tear him out of the seat. The Battra ranger kicked against the back of the operator’s chair, as if to flip them both out of the boat and into the wake, but before they could hit the water, they both vanished in a bolt of red.

____

Momentarily, they collapsed at the back of the underground docks, at the foot of the same stairwell Masako had leapt from. Jeremy was on the floor, panting quickly and heavily.

____

Masako stood, rolling her eyes as she looked down at him. Jeremy looked at her weakly, with surprise and just a tiny bit of fear, now directed solely at her.

“ _I_ would’ve let you die,” Masako admitted, though it was phrased as more of a threat. “But for some reason, those people up there still care about you, warts and all.”

She leaned in, glowing eyes making him suddenly tense up, but her next words were relatively calmed, and preceded by a quiet sigh.

“Do yourself a favor, and figure out how to be sorry. It’ll get you a lot farther in life than whatever _this_ shit is supposed to be.”

She led him back up the stairs by the shoulder, walking all the way. Professor Ando was there to greet them both at the top. The look he gave Jeremy was scolding, but mostly relieved, and he set a hand on the boy’s shoulder with kind reassurance.

____

He then gave a nod of thanks to Masako, who crossed her arms with an ambiguous glare.

____

Jeremy retreated to a corner, not saying a word as he scowled with downcast eyes.

The rest of them watched the storm.

The boat was nowhere to be seen, but the waterspout persisted, now much farther toward the left of the view and approaching a rocky cliff on the opposite side. Masako joined the quiet, stunned and awed observance until the cyclone had disappeared.

“Why’s it moving like that?” Lucy asked, after seeming to spend a while trying in vain to locate the answer herself. “It seemed… regular, just like the other one. Not wavering at all. Could the island’s currents do that, or…”

“Not that I’m aware of in my analysis,” the professor said with a frown, equally at a loss.

“Wait…” Shawn spoke up, an idea clearly forming by the way he had started frantically diverting his attention between the rock the waterspout had disappeared behind and a search of the immediate area of the room. He gripped a hand around the strap of his backpack, and stared blankly ahead, seeming to sort through information mentally. “Wait, I think I have something!”

He darted toward the table with the representation of Monster Island, the others making room around the edges as he swung his backpack around, opened the main zippered section, and began to dig through it.

Shawn slammed a tall, silver, insulated thermos down on the south end of the topographical map, in the flat area of light blue that represented the water just off the coast. He pointed just past it, to a sheer, water-facing mountain slope that now looked very familiar.

“We were _here_ , right after we ran into the waterspout and it threw us inland.”

____

He then grabbed hold of the thermos, rounding the corner of the table as the others in that section backed away even further. He stopped when he’d slid the thermos in a quarter-circle, ending at the eastern edge of the map. He pointed back toward a south-southeast point, where Masako recognized the waterfall ravine.

____

“It was still pouring rain, storming heavily when we were all separated, and Kristina and I were scoping out this building. But right before we all ran into each other…”

____

He grabbed the thermos again, dragging it along another turn, and this time _everyone_ cleared away from the table, leaving a full path around. He left it to the northwest of the island, then ran back around to indicate the valley, the small dividing range, and the coastal overlook they were all now standing within.

____

“…the storm started getting weaker.” He pointed back and forth a few times, between the building on the nearby side of the table and the thermos he'd left on the opposite.

____

Lucy gasped. “It’s the same storm! It’s going counterclockwise around the island!”

____

Shawn nodded. “Exactly, because after we walked all the way here with the professor, and Jeremy tried to take off in the boat…”

____

Jeremy crossed his arms and rolled his eyes weakly, but Shawn paid no attention, as he was already racing around the table. He caught the thermos with a reaching left arm, and dragged it with him to complete, then overtake the full circle, placing it back in front of the overlook structure where they’d all just seen the cyclone minutes earlier.

____

“…it was here again, and it brought the worst of the storm with it. When the cyclone is closer to us, the winds and rain are heavier, and when it’s on the other side of the island, the storm lets up.”

____

The professor nodded, but seemed to have reservations. “It makes sense. It makes a _lot_ of sense, given what we’ve seen, but _how_ would a storm do such a thing?”

____

“Hold on…” Masako cut in, still processing the information. “You said the _storm_ lifted you out of the water? Not the Ookondoru?”

____

Lucy shook her head. “We got blindsided. The waters were getting rough already, but it came at us from the side. The next thing we knew, our boat was circling up it, until we got launched at that mountain. _Then_ the condor attacked.”

____

There were about five seconds were several of the others, and even Lucy herself, noted the ominous portent in the words. The room was tense, almost superstitiously so, as if everyone was waiting to see whether fate would be tempted exactly as Lucy’s order of events had suggested. When the moment passed, those who’d partaken sighed with relief, a few showing the beginning signs of embarrassed laughter.

____

Then the grated window shattered inward, with a downpour of glass shards, as immense curving talons hooked through the gaps in the remaining metal cage.

____

Amid horrid screams, from both inside and outside, Masako watched the grate buckle, bars compressing between crushing claws and the whole of the protective barrier inching outward, the sound of flapping wings corroborating that the bird was trying to wrench it free.

____

“It won’t hold long!” Jason shouted amidst the chaos.

____

The eye lenses of Masako’s helmet cackled with a buildup of purple energy, Battra’s twin beams lancing out and leaving burns across the exposed flesh at the bases of the condor’s claws. The bird screeched again and let go, but only moments later, a quake coursed through the building from above. The impact repeated again and again, the condor trying to bring the hidden roof down on top of the station’s occupants.

____

“Stay here, I’ve got this!” Masako yelled, running for the door. At the threshold, she disappeared into red energy, striking back to physical form on the other side of the open vehicle hangar.

The Giant Condor flapped its ruffled, feathered wings, leaping into the air and bringing its weight down on top of the concealed shelter.

Bolts of red lightning struck upward from the water off the coast, a red form coalescing in the sky.

As the zord materialized on approach, Masako remained tense as the storm roared above it.

_So far, so good…_

A bolt of storm lightning struck the zord’s left wing in a violent flash, sending the machine tilting to that side. A fire had started at the point of impact, flames building even as the zord righted itself shakily and the rain continued to pour.

____

_Dammit_. Masako shrugged. _Guess it’ll have to do._

____

She bolted into the cockpit, materializing to blaring alarms. Taking the controls, she brought the damaged zord toward the mountain range and around for a strafe in the direction of the water, setting the condor in her sights.

____

Raising its neck, the condor turned, catching sight of the machine and letting loose a wild, horrific screech from its parted beak. It flapped its wings frantically to lift itself, then pushed back against the air, launching forward with feathers fluttering in the wind.

____

Masako dodged to the right, but the condor mirrored the maneuver to the left, the two circling one another until the bird was close enough to reach out and hook its claws around the Battra zord’s legs. It twisted, throwing the Battra zord hard against the side of a nearby mountain.

____

Reeling in the shaken cockpit, Masako shot upward just in time to avoid striking condor claws that now tore into rock instead of metal. The Battra zord circled overhead, flames trailing from the ring of exposed machinery around the moderately-sized hole through its left wing.

____

_ WATCH THE STORM. _

____

_I know, I know… wait._

____

The Battra zord dropped lower, just as a pair of lighting bolts struck two rocky peaks. With a screech, the condor pulled its claws free of the mountainside, turning and soaring quickly upward to meet its opponent.

____

Masako swung her zord’s first pair of legs to the sides, slapping with force to part lunging condor talons, then swung to a vertical orientation to match the bird’s as the two fliers collided. She pincer-struck the middle and rear pair of two-clawed, insect feet around the bird kaiju’s feathered underbelly, finding the grip was more secure than Masako had expected given what she knew of the species’ physiology, and despite the damage to one wing, the zord caught air and was able to take control of the colliding spin.

With a mechanical heave, Masako tilted the Battra zord nearly to inverted flight and threw the Ookondoru out of the spiraling grapple, launching it higher into the sky above.

Lighning struck the Giant Condor in the back, sending a fiery glow through the kaiju’s body. The dark lines of bones and arteries were briefly cast visible, backlit in orange, and a side effect was the revelation of just how completely _emaciated_ the creature had somehow become beneath its layer of feathers. Its torso lacked the pot-belly known in others of its kind, shrunken nearly to skin stretched over bone, and the rest of its body fared little better.

Trailing smoke, the creature fell, but caught the air on its wings, and let out a pained, _furious_ screech as it charged again for its opponent.

____

Condor claws took handfuls of the Battra zord’s exposed legs, sparks flying from the strained limbs as the screeching kaiju pulled both fliers into a spiraling dive. Embers from the zord’s damaged wing were dispersed into the trail of the combined, spinning meteor, while the _un_ damaged wing surged with energy.

____

Hinging and flapping the stiff wing against the condor, Masako sent dozens of red energy bolts into the avian kaiju’s flesh, forcing the creature to release its grip from the convulsions alone. Parting from the dive, Masako struggled to pull out of her descent, but managed a parallel flight only meters from the ground.

____

The condor slammed into a mountain on the southern side of the hidden cliff-face overlook, and tumbled down against a smaller spire before sprawling on the flat ground closer to the shadow of the dividing range.

____

Even more smoke now rose from its singed feathers, but the condor yet stirred, rising on taloned feet and kicking off with its wings. Instead of engaging its opponent, however, it surged forward, quickly crossing the ground toward the smashed-in vehicle hangar.

____

Which was _fine_ , because the others had _stayed inside_ , just like Masako had told them.

____

The Battra ranger sighed.

____

Lucy was out in the open, her camera having been up and recording the battle overhead despite the wind and rain. Kristina, at least, was tugging at her other wrist, trying to pull her back, but Lucy wasn’t budging.

____

The condor cawed, its beak parted for an easy meal, and only then did the two students begin to scramble back down the grassy slope of collapsed roof.

____

They weren’t going to make it.

____

Masako pulled against the controls, eye beams charging up as the zord dove toward pursuit.

____

The twin purple beams hit the ground, and surged forward faster than the condor’s flight as the Battra zord’s angle changed through the leveling curve. They intercepted the creature at about the midpoint of the right wing, burning across the limb’s dorsal surface, igniting feathers…

____

…and completely severing the outer half of the wing from the bird’s body.

____

_Oh shit._

____

The Giant Condor fell out of the air, kicking a cloud of dust from the ground as it impacted and slid to a stop just shy of the open hangar. Its pained, dying screech filled the land and sky as the severed wing tumbled across the ground and over the cliff, into the sea.

____

Masako hadn’t expected it to be that weak. Malnourished was one thing, but this… this was something else.

____

Then the condor stood up.

____

The creature leapt, pushing off the ground with its remaining wing, several hops carrying it into a frantic turn to face its attacker. The bird screeched to the heavens, its beak parted to the sky like a warbling, unholy war cry as its neck swung back and forth in convulsion.

____

Masako hit the beams again, and swerved left, the Battra zord’s turn carrying the attack in a horizontal sweep. Purple light sent flames rising from the condor’s exposed neck, and once they passed, the cry had been silenced. The creature’s head hit the ground near its left foot, while its neck fell with the creature’s body, to end at a cauterized stump farther out to its right.

____

Taking a deep, unsettled breath, Masako continued the Battra zord’s spin into a swerve, drifting backwards over the flat ground to the facility’s northern side and setting the flying machine upon its six feet. The rain had finally put out the last embers from its wing, leaving only a gaping hole through the layers of metal.

____

_What the fuck was that about?_

____

When Masako appeared at the upper edge of the slope to the hangar, Lucy and Kristina had both returned, this time accompanied by Jason. Lucy looked especially saddened, and there was little mystery why that was.

____

“I… didn’t know it would do that,” Masako mumbled guiltily. “The wing. Then it was… I don’t know.”

____

“I don’t know either,” Lucy voiced back, carrying more confusion than blame. “I was watching, and everything about what happened up there, and down here… it was _weird_.”

____

Cautiously, the four of them approached the condor’s corpse, each of their minds spinning for any kind of explanation.

____

“There’s plenty of those sea star things here, right?” Masako posed with a frown, “it should’ve had more than enough food if that was the issue…”

____

“Even if it was starving or dying, it’s wing and… _neck_ shouldn’t have been structurally weak like that,” said Lucy, her face screwing up. “And it definitely shouldn’t have _got back up_.”

____

“Looked like something out of a zombie apocalypse,” Kristina began, almost jokingly. “Night of the screeching dead!”

____

Lucy stopped.

____

“That… that’s it!” she spoke up, almost cheering in revelation as she turned and took Kristina excitedly by the shoulders.

____

Kristina had closed her sparkling-magenta-shadowed eyelids, smiling as the other girl appeared ready to pull closer in her abounding joy, but Lucy had already turned back toward the condor, quickening her pace as she rattled off her new, inspired hypothesis.

____

“It was flying in the rain, right? Screeching mad, and… and the _skull-crawler_ too! They behave sort of like that all the time, so I didn’t think much of it, but…”

____

“You… think the monsters are zombies?” Masako stated in disbelief, noting that Jason was exhibiting a similar difficulty in following the logic.

____

“No, not…” Lucy continued, “but they’ve been acting strangely the whole time. It was like… like some kind of _infection_. Like a hate plague!”

____

“Or like rabies?” suggested Kristina, now running alongside Lucy with little remaining outward sign of disappointment.

____

Lucy seemed embarrassed for only a brief moment. “Yeah, or like rabies!”

____

They were approaching the condor’s body, the stump of its right wing facing them while its feathered back rose up like a small hill behind it. Seeing it up close, Masako now had a better sense of just how bad of a shape the kaiju had been in all along. Its feathers were twisted in all directions, even more so than they’d appeared to be, and it was missing entire patches of them all along its body. _That_ hadn’t been visible at all, as those parts of its exposed skin were still a very similar shade of red, but up close almost seemed to be growths of very fine red fur, or a red moss of some sort.

____

The creature was still, but as Lucy rushed up to the tattered remnant of its wing, something stirred on the surface.

____

Masako barely had time to react, leaping forward through energy and taking hold of Lucy’s backpack by one hand. As she pulled the girl back, she lunged out her other arm, red lightning building down the gauntlet and striking out through her fingertips.

____

The three tiny, leaping creatures exploded midair from the energy bolts, scattering into chunks of spiny red flesh and splatters of yellow and white-green fluid from inside.

____

They weren’t alone. A patch of the non-feather red substance on the condor’s wing disassembled into more of the dinner-plate-sized creatures – some sliding in a crawl on their six radial limbs, others leaping into the air without seeming direction, and others writhing the thin, threadlike yellow tentacles between their legs, opening and closing hidden jaws in their bumpy dorsal surfaces in some sort of threat display.

____

Masako ushered the others back again and again, arms held out like a barrier in front of them, as the leaping creatures managed to draw closer, some spraying geysers of liquid from their dorsal jaws. “More starfish?” she asked, noting similarities in the structural appearance even if these creatures were clearly something else.

____

Lucy shook her head. “Not starfish, these are…”

____

_ BAREM. _

____

“What’s a Barem?”

____

“They’re created by…”

____

Moving around the island, faintly visible far away past the mountain peaks, the circling cyclone kept to its path, following the will of the sea dragon in the waters beneath it.

____

_ DAGAHRA. _

____


	3. Ghosts of Monster Island - Part 2

She tried to suppress the sound as much as she seemed able, but Lucy winced and cried out, recoiling from the three small wisps of steam where droplets of the Barems’ acid had made contact with exposed skin on her upper left arm.

Kristina was at her side immediately, and Jason soon after, while Masako spread her wings as a more substantial shield between the students and the approaching creatures. Their leaping was becoming more coordinated, or perhaps simply more effective by sheer volume, as more Barem jumped from the Giant Condor’s corpse to seek out new sustenance.

“We have to get her inside!” Jason yelled as the group continued to back away. Masako saw the others turn, breaking into the closest thing they could manage to a full sprint while helping Lucy along from either side.

Masako’s wings and gauntlets coursed with red, bolts of energy striking at the advancing horde. Barem burned and dissolved to ash, but more of the creatures recovered the losses in progress almost instantly.

Glancing out to the side, Masako issued a command to the grounded Battra zord. The machine’s undamaged right wing, too, now surged with energy, and the red bolts struck forward like the cackling crack of fireworks. Out of the wing’s leading edge and at sharp angles from the underside, the storm of lightning vaporized the Barem on the ground, then washed over the condor’s body, lightning it up with flashes and smoke as the toxic creatures were cleansed.

Masako reached the doorway just as Jason was opening his medical kit, Lucy knelt on the ground with Kristina close and holding her steady. Marcia had pulled out a water bottle from her small backpack, taking a cloth from Jason’s kit and holding it to the rim.

“No,” Jason began sharply. “You need fl—”

“—owing water for acid burns,” Masako recited beside him.

Marcia frowned, but handed over the whole bottle, allowing Jason to carefully pour it down Lucy’s arm, guiding Kristina into the right angle of support.

Jason passed a strange glance at Masako. “Medical training?”

Masako shook her head, suspecting her helmet had hidden her light sigh. “Nope. Just… experience.”

Jason nodded with understanding, and set back to work.

  


* * *

  


When the storm was at its weakest, the cyclone on the farthest side of the island barring any unexpected movement, Masako took the Battra zord up.

The insectoid machine was rocked by wind, not helped by the hole burnt through its left wing. Still, Masako found a steady altitude, and hoped.

“This is Battra ranger calling lame rangers, repeat, Battra ranger calling lame rangers.” She half-scoffed, rolling her eyes at the expected silence. “I’ve got a bunch of tourist-scientists stranded on Monster Island with Dagahra, that _seems_ like the kind of thing you should get involved in…”

She waited around thirty seconds, then tried one more time.

“Hello! Egotistical, do-gooder assholes, we have a legitimate situation here! Giant toxic monster on the loose! I’m sure it’ll be _your_ problem too, soon enough!”

Masako was about to simply give up, and shut down the channel, when a new window popped open on her viewscreen.

“Oh, uh… sorry! I was just…” The maroon-armored ranger paused in thought, his helmet bearing a small, orange forehead-horn that curved upward, and double-points along the sides that evoked claw-shaped ears. “…Is this a real mission thing, or…”

“ _Yes_ , it’s a real mission thing!” Masako nearly shouted, then calmed from exhaustion, breathing slowly while she considered. “To tell the truth, I honestly didn’t expect anyone to answer. Is there some kind of battle I’m interrupting, or…”

“Oh, nope, no battle!” The Baragon ranger cheerfully confirmed, then paused.

“Guess it’s lucky you were in your zord, then, what’s the occasion?”

“Yeah… it’s just a… a _training exercise_.” The relief of a believable excuse settled over the ranger’s visible features. “This is a… a very, very important training exercise, and _definitely_ not my entry into the mile low club or anything like that.”

Behind lenses, Masako’s eyes widened in brief surprise, before she registered both the emphasis in the other ranger’s tone, and the contents of the small ledge visible in the rear of the cockpit – a cooler, a metal cutting board, a jar of mayonnaise, and piles of lettuce and diced tomatoes.

“So, when you say that…” Masako squinted. “You’re talking about a club _sandwich_.”

Proudly, the crimson ranger held up a plate to the camera, containing a sliced segment of said food item. “Yeah! What else would it be?”

Masako _snorted_ , the only thing she could do to keep from fully bursting out with laughter. At the other ranger’s complete confusion, she simply took a long, smiling breath inside her helmet, resting her elbows on the dash. “It’s been a long day for me, okay? Dagahra is loose on Monster Island, and somehow _I’m_ the one stuck here babysitting a bunch of horror movie antagonists.”

The Baragon ranger… _stared_. For long enough that Masako started to replay her own sentence in her head.

“Sorry, I meant _pro_ tagonists,” she corrected. “I watch those movies differently.”

“…Really?”

“No, I don’t watch horror movies,” Masako admitted, unsure why she was being honest now of all times. Something about this kid’s obliviousness just got to her, she guessed. “Every scene in a horror movie is a way I’ve already watched one of my friends die in real life, so there’s no point.”

Another long, blank stare.

“No, I’m not fun at parties,” Masako deadpanned. “Are you gonna do anything? Anyone… _else_ , you could call, maybe? You’re part of that, what, west coast team or something, right? The second megazord the other rangers fought that one time, and now you’re friends?”

“We were mind-controlled. By the Xiliens.”

“Right, yeah, that.” Masako stared for a while, hoping he’d finally pick up on the urgency.

“Oh, and I’m Yuzo!” He began instead, then stopped suddenly, in mild panic. “I mean… Ba _rr_ agon _rr_ ange _rr_ ,” he corrected, tilting his head down and ‘arr’-ing his ‘r’s as if imitating a growl.

Masako rolled her eyes, but found herself smiling again. Curiosity dawned, then, as she recalled a lingering question. “Hey, does Baragon, ever… talk to you?”

“What? No, nah?” Yuzo brushed off.

Masako blinked. “He… doesn’t?”

_ I WAS ACTUALLY FAIRLY CERTAIN THAT— _

“We’re not really on speaking terms, ever since he tried to get me to eat all the animals at the petting zoo,” Yuzo explained with a wave, “but usually he just gushes over how amazing human food is and tries to get me to make more friends.”

“…Oh.”

“So, anyway…” Yuzo began, uncertain, but his confidence rose when he seemed to strike at the correct memory. “I’ll just… get back to the surface and tell the guys. About the Dagahra thing. We’ll be there in no time!”

The signal cut out, and Masako was left taking deep breaths, before gently lowering the Battra zord out of the heavy winds and back toward the ground.

_Any chance we could fix that wing?_

_ I BELIEVE THE CONSTRUCT CAN ONLY BE RESTORED FROM DAMAGE BY EXTENDED TIME IN A NONCORPOREAL STATE. _

_And how long will that be?_

_ MULTIPLE OF YOUR HOURS. _

Masako exited the zord, and directed it out over the water, where it disappeared into crimson lightning once more.

_Well, let’s just hope it’s a while before we need it again._

The walk back to the overlook building was quiet, though Masako remained cautious. Most of the Barem had been dealt with, but there was always the chance of a lone straggler ready to cause a bad, acid-filled day for anyone who wandered too close.

Professor Ando was resting in a swivel chair, cleaning off his glasses before returning the cloth to a pocket in his brown expedition jacket. He took the time to straighten out the necktie he insisted on wearing with it, before standing to greet Masako as she entered.

“Any luck?” he inquired, his hopefulness about intermediate.

“…I _think_ ,” Masako answered truthfully. “I was able to make contact with a ranger, and I’d say… maybe a seventy-five percent chance he can get his team to cooperate.”

Shawn perked up. “Serious business rangers, or party rangers?”

Masako had never heard them described like _that_ before, but she could see it. “If those are the options, I’m pretty sure we got the party rangers.”

“So we’re saved!” Jeremy declared with a smirk that hid his relief behind false confidence, reclining back in a swivel chair with his hands behind his head. “Just gotta chill here for a bit—”

“Don’t say that!” Shannon outburst suddenly, the scowl on her face twinged with fear. The dim, staggered light shining through the twisted window grid lit up her golden-yellow tank top and toned arms as she rose from her seat on the floor and stood firm in challenge. “We’re still stuck on this island, and _anything_ could happen before help gets here!”

“She’s right,” Kyle agreed, though possibly speaking only to diffuse the building tension. “We still need to be cautious.”

Professor Ando had been about to say something, when he paused at the sound of several loud, overlapping screeches from somewhere outside.

From how argumentative she’d been only moments prior, Masako might have expected Shannon to use the event as a retort against Jeremy, but she’d gone silent instead, her eyes wide and alert.

The wild calls built to a chorus of cacophony, the hunger cries of an advancing horde.

Kristina sighed with a shudder as she took Lucy’s hand and held it tight. “Now I really hate that I brought up zombies…”

Several skull-crawlers leapt into view, clawed feet gripping the bars in the cage as they lunged their armored heads through the gaps.

“They _do_ have red speckles,” Masako chided, eyeing the Barem parasites clinging sparsely across their bodies as she brought energy to her eyes and gauntlets.

A powerful barrage of targeted attacks knocked the climbing reptiles free of the window and presumably, sent them tumbling to the water below. That might be a problem if they found the tunnels to the lower floor, presuming more hadn’t already infiltrated that room and were now working their way up the stairs. With that, plus the doorway to the open hangar behind them, there were far too many entrances to cover effectively.

They needed to get out, _now_.

As three more skull-crawlers fell from the windows, their bodies just barely too wide to fit through the gaps in the metal frame, a fourth had scrambled up to the left side, making progress while the Battra ranger was occupied with the others.

Exhibiting a momentary flicker of ingenuity, it gripped the reinforcement bar below it with its right leg, then contorted its left shoulder, pressing its other foot palm-first into the bar above it. Exercising its muscles, the reptile pushed on the two metal beams until they strained apart, creating enough of a gap that the creature was able to propel the bulk of its long body through the opening in one smooth, rapid movement, with the frame snapping back in place behind it.

Masako dealt with it quickly, beams lancing into its left side and out the right, but more skull-crawlers attempted to follow its methods, pushing themselves gradually through the bars. Their jaws snapped as they struggled, and several Barem were scraped free by the movement, adding to those leaping from the crawler that made it inside to begin a new attack on the room’s occupants.

Jason was moving quickly around the table with the map, snapping pictures of the island’s three-dimensional layout with a handheld camera much larger and professional-looking that Lucy’s. One of the Barem lunged for him, but missed and landed on the recreation, its six legs draping and slowly sliding over the crest of a mountain range. Whiplike tendrils spasmed threateningly, accompanied by a loud hiss, as if to declare the creature’s imagined dominion over all.

It was turned to ash by a sustained bolt of red lightning, Masako dealing with the smaller creatures while striking the larger reptiles with burning attacks that left them dead but not pushed back through the window. Crocodilian heads hung limp into the building, while the blockage of their bodies seemed to momentarily stall the infiltration efforts of the living creatures now crawling around behind them.

In the moment’s offered calm, Masako bolted to the left-side staircase, indeed finding at least seven skull-crawlers already occupying the lower room. Several were just climbing out of the water, while others were clinging to the outer railings of the stairwells, ascending in two parallel columns. Masako let loose her eye beams on the zig-zagging frames, easily melting the thin metal and freeing the stairs from the wall.

From just below her perch and all the way to the floor, the skull-crawlers now had to contend with a sheer metal wall that resisted their penetrating claws, as they did on both the right and left sides of the room. They’d make easier progress on the bare rock face that composed the far wall, but would have trouble again with the metal ceiling.

That was two entrances cut off, but not for long. Masako returned to the room, and made for the doorway in the back.

The hangar was only faring slightly better as an escape route. Two skull-crawlers were already wandering down the slope on the left side, while a third leapt from behind scattered wreckage in the pit itself, screeching loudly at Masako from atop the overturned transport truck.

Under the creature’s weight, the overturned vehicle shifted.

“…I have an idea,” Masako sneered, still staring down the nearest creature.

“Will it work?” Asked someone from behind her who was probably Jason.

“I have no clue, but I’m about ninety percent sure that if it _doesn’t_ , I’ll still be alive afterward and we can try something else.”

With that, Masako leapt out to meet the skull-crawler, and was instantly blindsided when it turned on nimble feet and swung its powerful tail, catching her from the left and sending her crashing into the hangar wall farther off to the right.

Sliding to the floor, Masako regained shaky footing, lifting her gaze to find the creature leaping down from the truck while the two others took flanking positions behind. The one closest to the doorway snapped at the others still inside, but they quickly backed out of reach of even the creature’s extendable tongue.

The closest skull-crawler charged, intending to use its armored skull like a ram, but Masako leapt through lightning to appear overhead, spinning to throw a bolt of energy downward at its spine before reappearing on the floor, her back against the top of the truck’s covered canopy.

Enraged, the skull-crawler turned for another charge, but by then, one of the other two had rounded from the doorway-side, appearing from around the truck’s front bumper to lash out with its tongue. Masako teleported aside, but the charging crawler skidded to a stop at her disappearance, both of them casting noses about in a search before Masako lightning-struck them both from atop a damaged helicopter in the hangar corner.

At their screeches, Masako hit the floor, placing both crawlers between herself and the truck. The reptiles started running, knocking into one another in their haste, and Masako rushed ahead to meet them. A red bolt carried her, again, over the creatures and toward the truck.

_Second time’s the charm?_

_ I DO NOT THINK THAT IS THE SAYING. _

Scrambling, the skull-crawlers turned in opposing directions, their heads colliding in the middle before the now-leftmost creature kicked its companion aside with a powerful foot. Rushing at its prey, the reptile held its skull forward, only for Masako to perform an acrobatic leap over the truck the moment prior to the collision.

Masako wrapped her hands around a metal exhaust pipe on the air-facing side of the truck’s undercarriage, using her own, hanging weight in an attempt to aid the momentum from the skull-crawler’s collision. The truck was thrown into a wavering tilt from the impact, Masako’s feet almost reaching the ground, but the effort hadn’t been enough, and the vehicle fell back on its side.

 _Shit_ , Masako thought, and was then alerted to the third skull-crawler who’d lingered behind the truck. Now with its prey in sight, the reptile lashed its tongue, the tree tendrils at its forked end reaching hungrily for the Battra ranger.

Masako expertly flipped overhead, landing in a readied stance on the upturned side of the truck’s canopy while the tongue’s fork wrapped around the exhaust pipe she’d been holding onto moments earlier. The skull-crawler dug its claws into the concrete, and pulled back.

Sliding to a stumble on her now-tilting perch, Masako held her hands out in wavering panic, and was thrown off her feet when the skull-crawler wrenched the truck fully over.

Flat on her face on the concrete, Masako pushed herself up, glancing behind her to find the transport truck now standing on all four tires.

Slowly, her glance turned back to the approaching skull-crawler, the reptile almost seeming proud of its ingenuity as it jogged hungrily for its meal.

“…Okay, enough of _this_.”

Purple beams burned into the reptile’s open mouth and down the internal length of its horizontal running stance, choking it with black smoke as it stumbled and fell to a rolling stop just prior to reaching for Masako.

In a bolt of red, the ranger had retaken her perch on the truck, now able to stand on the actual upper side of its canopy. Another pair of sweeping beams left a deep, burning gash along one of the remaining crawlers, from hip to snout and passing through its left eye, and caught the other through a roaring screech, severing the top half of its head entirely.

As she spun on her feet, her coat opened to an umbrella of wings, red energy coursing through the membranes. Bolts struck out by the dozens, finishing off the skull-crawler with the burn wound and reducing to ash the Barem that had been knocked free, or were now poised to leap from corpses.

“Anyone think you could get this working?”

Jason rushed out through the doorway, keeping his head down as he made the short run for the truck. More skull-crawlers had gathered around the edges of the pit, and Masako built energy throughout her gauntlets, wings, and eyes all.

As hungry reptiles leapt and were struck down by beams and lightning, Jason pried a panel open from below the truck’s dashboard, pulling wires and twisting them as he tested the ignition. Finally, the telltale sound of a starting engine heralded one bright spot of hope in one hellish day.

“Where’d you learn that?” Masako shouted with approval, turning to stretch out her left wings like a knife and bombard a crawler with several red bolts from the edges.

“Saradia,” Jason shouted back, stepping down from the truck’s side door and waving over the others still in the building.

“Soldier?” Masako grunted as one skullcrawler managed to leap in close.

She drew inward and thrust upward with her right elbow, the two red-orange spikes hooking into the creature’s throat and splitting its lower jaw in half up the middle. A powerful discharge of energy from her other hand sent it sprawling back to the ground, the truck only shaken a little from the brief impact of its feet.

“ _Photographer_ ,” Jason corrected, one hand on the edge of the door frame to steady himself while he hoisted the others up into the vehicle one by one.

“Let me guess,” Masako began with a smirk, firing off another sweep of purple eye beams to ward more skull-crawlers back from the pit’s edge. “Once the bombs start dropping, it doesn’t make much of a difference?”

Professor Ando had ushered the students ahead of himself, and now Jason was watching his injured leg, carefully guiding the older man up into the transport.

“You’re not far off! Now, let’s get moving!”

Shawn took the wheel, and in no time at all, the truck was rumbling up the left-side slope to the top of the pit. Masako struck her beams across several skull-crawlers’ inverted knees, and used a burst from her wings to shock another out of its leap as the transport cleared the final upper ledge and raced off onto flat ground.

There were skull-crawlers on all sides, but Masako managed to keep most of them at bay, focusing her beam fire on their legs to stop them in their tracks. While she was concentrating on a horde to the truck’s left, a solitary crawler snuck in from behind, its reaching limbs taking hold of both sides of the truck’s canopy before pulling its entire body forward across the roof in a headbutt.

Masako felt the dense bone collide against her spine, knocking her ahead until she was hanging over the truck’s cab.

“I _told_ you this thing looked too much like a loaf of bread!” someone yelled from inside.

With its claws hooked securely into the cover on either side, the skull-crawler threw off the truck’s course with its weight, the vehicle beginning to swerve chaotically. As Masako clambered back to the canopy’s front ridge, the reptile screamed and lunged with its jaws, shaking the truck even further with its reaching attempts to snap the ranger up.

Masako split her eye beams wide, targeting the bases of both the skull-crawler’s limbs and pressing the attack until the reptile screamed in pain and steam rose from its hips. Finally, the remaining, snakelike torso of the creature dropped against the canopy roof and quickly slid off the back.

The limbs fell to either side of the truck, dragging on the ground with the toe-claws still pinned in place. Vibration shook the left-side limb free after a few seconds, but the one on the right held firm.

At least, until another skull-crawler dropped from the mountainside and charged, illuminated in bright headlights and making a run for the truck from directly in the vehicle’s path.

Masako leaned back over the windshield. “Swing a left!”

Shawn complied just as the collision neared, and Masako watched with a smile as the trailing, severed limb caught air, smacking the other creature in the face and becoming finally dislodged from the vehicle in the process.

“Hell yeah!” Masako yelled with a fist-pump, getting back to her feet just as the truck swerved back on course to take the narrower, more vegetated path through the mountains.

  


* * *

  


Navigating the shadowed trail of a darkened ravine, Jason and Shawn managed to locate what might well have been the only paved road on all of Monster Island. Headlights beaming ahead through the gap, the team pressed on, clear to the end.

Surrounded on three sides by sheer rock wall, the fourth by another outlet to the island’s eastern coast, was the largest of the communication hubs, and the only one to feature an open airfield surrounded by above-ground buildings.

Even this place had been largely ransacked, the edges of the space littered with the trampled remnants of satellite dishes and shield generators. The dim light through the heavy storm was cast upon red-brown rock, the atmosphere taking on an odd, almost sunset-like quality despite it still being in the early afternoon.

The transport truck approached cautiously over the abandoned, concrete airfield, toward the north-side rock wall and the mostly intact command complex – a scaffold of multi-level, stacked building modules that formed a relatively thin layer of human construction set flush against the sheer cliff behind it. The forward surface was reinforced by a heavy cage of interlocked vertical, horizontal, and diagonal metal beams, bashed-in in several places but holding overall.

Only meters from the apparent entrance, the group filtered out of the truck, the sideways-parked vehicle acting as a shield against anything approaching from behind.

Then, there was a loud, unfamiliar sound like a demonic, distorted chattering, emanating on a constant buzz from several of the nearby, wrecked structures on either side.

“What _is_ that?” Marcia gasped, her entire body shaking, with her arms drawing inward and bracing for a likely ineffective defense.

Kyle was keeping his eyes on the others – _all_ the others – placing his back against the side of the truck to gain a collective view of the entire group. He clearly wasn’t planning on leaving anyone behind, ever again.

Shannon had her hands over the straps of her purple backpack, eyes wide with haunting unease, ready to run at any moment.

Shawn had his mind intently focused, ears turned toward the noise in an attempt to resolve its true nature. His lips had settled in a stymied, frustrated frown.

Jeremy was edging toward a pile of loose rubble closer to where the group stood, the refuse including at least one long piece of metal rebar that could serve purpose as a makeshift weapon.

Jason placed himself opposite the truck, the group behind him as he braced his knees to duck low.

Kristina had Lucy’s hand, even as Lucy herself looked about for any shelter, any plan of escape. She saw Jason’s apparent plan and started diverting her attention to the nearby debris, as well.

“That sound….” Professor Ando pondered aloud, seeming to have yet, some distant familiarity that Shawn lacked, even if the answer evaded him just the same.

Then, the buzzing doubled, and shapes shot upward.

Masako’s first thought of comparison was the meganula, but these were smaller, and much louder. Indistinct, they swarmed through the air, darting blurs of blue, white and neon green.

Speed wasn’t their advantage for long.

Masako shot upward to the nearest entity, leading its trajectory and drawing back her left arm to rake it with her blade-catchers. To her surprise, she found the forearm spikes tearing not through flesh, or even a chitinous exoskeleton, but _metal_.

There wasn’t time for a further examination. With the machine taking a nosedive, Masako bolted to the next, and the next, catching hold of neon green wings shaped like helicopter rotors and tearing them free of a blue dorsal plate covered in thin, backswept needle-spines. Another leap through energy found her barely avoiding the lunging, mechanical limb of a mostly white-plated, wasp-like stinger. Her forearm spikes found several spots of translucent green plating on the side of the stinger bulb, tearing through them and, as she’d predicted, causing the robot to catastrophically vent the energy contained within.

She struck to the ground in time to engage a machine that had perched upon the truck’s upper canopy, Kyle caught squarely in its sights. The insectoid construct screeched down at him, its two upper, miniscule white fangs and much larger, lower, skeletal white half-jawbones parting to an even more demonic, synthesized roar.

It was built like a wasp, the main paneling cast in white while a deep, reflective blue formed the dorsal armor on its head and spine-covered thorax, several upward-facing plates on its four, segmented legs, its rear pair of hook-shaped feet, and one segment of its stinger tail just before the wider bulb. Between, there was a black understructure visible for the joints, and while its two insect-mimicking antennae were short and white with black receiver tips, there was a third, thin, radio-control style antenna offset on the left side of its head. Its glowing, red eyes were large and spherical, set wide but shaped for unobstructed, forward visibility, and its green wings rested outward-parallel like those of a dragonfly, the front pair with forward-facing sickle hooks at the outer ends and the back pair with the same structure pointing to the rear.

Masako’s eye beams struck it between those demonic, half-deer-skull side mandibles, its entire head exploding in sparks before the rest of it slumped backward over the truck.

The professor gasped with recognition. “Those are Cameron Winter’s cyber-flies!”

Jeremy swung his makeshift bat, but the fly darted away in a blur, reappearing behind him and firing a blue, electrical beam from its stinger. Jeremy convulsed, surrounded in surging volts of energy, and collapsed on the ground.

Masako made to lunge, but was struck in the back by three electrical beams at once.

The energetic assault brought her near to her knees, but she tensed, red energy surging through her to counter. When she stood with arms wide, her own lightning reversed the current, striking back to the three hovering flies and detonating them in showers of sparks and warped machinery.

She rounded, but found her next move stopping short.

There were four cyber-flies remaining, surrounding the group in a tight square. In each of the ensnaring cages formed by their insectoid legs were an unconscious Jeremy, a panicking, fear-stricken Marcia, a calm and outwardly resigned Jason, and a struggling, seething Lucy.

Loudspeakers all around the airfield crackled to life.

_“Hello. Is this thing on?”_

The falsely amiable, casual voice was edged with superiority. Masako looked to Professor Ando for confirmation, but the older man didn’t seem to be hearing what he’d expected to.

_“Yes, well… do mind my little guard dogs, here. I got them special from an old colleague of mine. Professional courtesy and all that…”_

At the base of the main complex, a set of wide doors opened, revealing a flat, metallic platform with black-and-yellow caution stripes stickered around the edges.

_“Since you’re here, I suppose it’s only fitting you stick around and watch the show. Do consider my invitation carefully, I’d certainly worry how your friends might fare if you refuse.”_

All at once, the four cyber-flies shifted their leg-cages tighter, prompting momentary gasps

Energy was coursing through Masako’s gauntlets, but she looked around to the others. Kyle was furious, Shawn was stricken still behind the glare of his glasses, Kristina was _distraught_ , and Shannon’s eyes were dark and pleading.

“We’ll do what he says, _for now_ ,” the professor spoke quietly, though it was also more a plea than an instruction, in Masako’s case.

_Whoever this fucker is, I’m going to enjoy gutting him like a fish. Or a fisherman._

_ BATTRA WILL ENSURE HIS DEATH IS AN UNENDING TORTURE. _

Masako let the charge dissipate from her gauntlets. Dropping her arms, she took the first step toward the offered platform. “Let’s see this fuckin’ _show_ then.”

They filled out the outlined space, the cyber-flies and their captives taking position at the four corners. Their hovering was finely attuned, as the machines kept level with the platform even as it began to rise up through the center of the complex.

Kristina’s eyes never left Lucy. Masako questioned whether any kind of reassurance would even be received. Her fury was building, but even then, a blind rage wouldn’t save them like treading cautiously just might.

“You’re fast,” Marcia spoke up weakly.

At the words, the cyber-fly imprisoning her shifted its legs in warning, seeming keenly on guard.

Masako shook her head. “Not fast enough.”

She wasn’t sure that was quite true, but it was what she wanted their captor to think, either way.

Marcia smiled, a tear falling. “Just get Lucy and Jason, then.”

If Masako could imagine an entire elevator full of people, all reacting as if they’d been stabbed in the heart, this was pretty close. If several of them had been struggling to refrain from rushing at the cyber-flies before, they were barely managing it now, for an entirely different reason.

“ _How adorable_ ,” the broadcast voice drawled, his sickeningly vile amusement readable through the audio alone.

Rather than stop in any kind of dedicated elevator space, the platform simply rose to the level where it became the center of the floor for a larger room above, one with a front window overlooking the airfield, sets of active monitors and terminals to either side, and a doorway on the back wall that hissed open upon the ascent’s completion.

Exiting the wide hallway behind him was an American man, closer to Professor Ando in age. He had auburn hair, likely dyed, and carried with him a seven-barreled, rotating-chamber MASER rifle that looked enormous in even his muscular arms.

Smiling, he gestured to the screens around the room, most showing inert views of the island while several seemed set up specifically to track various points along the cyclone’s path.

“How lucky you all are, bearing witness to the latest venture of the great Leon Heron!”

Masako glared through static lenses, smirking where he couldn’t see. “I’ve never heard that name _once_ before in my life… nor do I think I will remember it.”

Leon narrowed his eyes, but it became a boastful smile momentarily. “Well, surely you know me by enterprise. My company deals in everything from _diamonds_ to… paper napkins!”

“We’re millenians, we don’t buy _either_ of those things,” Masako clapped back, then paused, setting a finger to her chin. “Think I actually used the wrong word, there…”

Leon was about to reply, when he received some kind of electronic alert, and frowned, pulling a yellow-plated control pad from his suit pocket. He sighed, shook his head, and tapped a control, before directing his attention to one of the screens.

On the monitor, the waterspout diverted from its path around the island, and dispersed to scattering winds as it neared the shore. From below the sea, the bright teal, wide, curved-wing carapace of Dagahra rose into view, the tall, beige-gold dorsal spikes breaking the surface in a single, fin-connected row down the creature’s back.

A crown of three similarly-structured spikes adorned the reptilian head, with more fins around the hinge of the jaw and below the chin to contrast sharply with the creature’s teal skin and create an appearance similar to a bearded dragon. With thick, forward-pointing spikes protruding from bulky shoulders, the sea dragon waded onto land, sturdy front legs marching forward while the rear limbs dragged flat, more prominent fins running down the sides.

Dagahra… seemed to stumble, clearly exhausted, disoriented, or both. He barely managed to drag his long, jagged-fin-fluked tail fully out of the water before collapsing in a heap, breathing deeply as he fell to rest.

“Very well, regain your strength, if you must,” Leon spoke with open disdain. “Your endurance will be satisfactory for my purposes soon enough.”

From within the grip of the cyber-fly, Lucy squirmed, her face somewhere between confused and appalled. “You’re… making him _run laps?_ ”

Leon smiled happily in her direction, but there was not an ounce of warmth within it. “Dagahra yet has its limits, but as it gains strength, the fortitude to sustain its abilities indefinitely, it will be the perfect weapon in my arsenal. Barem will paint the tides red across the world, the life-giving currents broken from their enduring shape to leave dead zones in their wake. The very sea itself torn asunder, lashed to chains and made mine to do with as I please!”

“To what end?” Professor Ando began sternly, stepping to the front of the group with building, righteous fury. “To lay siege on ports? On _Nations?_ To hold entire coastlines hostage? To destroy intercontinental trade, or set your own balance to the world’s naval strength?”

Leon smiled with impressed surprise. “All… _very_ good ideas, let me write those down.” He scoffed, and shook his head. “But _no_ , I’m not in this for a payday, or out of a misguided sense of patriotism.”

“Of course not,” spoke Masako, dull disappointment in her exasperated tone. “Didn’t you hear him before? It’s not about anything _reasonable_ , it’s about _us_. He wants us to _watch the show_.”

Leon grinned fiercely, eyeing the Battra ranger with impressed glee. “ _Very_ good. Yes, yes… you know what’s up, don’t you?”

“I know your type,” Masako leveled in deadpan accusation, “I know what gets you off these days, no need to hide it on my account.”

“I never intended to,” drawled Leon, eyes taking in the room with open, indulgent cruelty, “I know what’s… _fragile_ , in this world. I saw you, all those like you _cry your crocodile tears_ when the _rainforests burned_ , and I knew, _oh_ , I knew… I knew just how to break you. Everything precious to you, I will take away, and why? Because I _can_. I can, and I _will_ , and there’s nothing you can do to stop me! You have no power, no way to _save_ whatever it is is so _fucking important_ today, and that’s just how life is. The sooner you see that, the sooner you’ll see that you’re all, irritating whiny brats with such astounding cognitive dissonance you actually believe the real world cares one iota what any of you have to say!”

Battra _seethed_ , his appetite for death coursing through Masako like a power all its own.

Masako took a long breath that became a whistle.

“So, to _summarize_ , some boyband asshole in a leather jacket and sunglasses handed you the Dagahra coin, and said ‘hey, do whatever you want with this!’ and you said ‘golly gee, _absolutely_ I’ll terraform the planet for the Xiliens!’ because you’re exactly the kind of spiteful, no-life, corporate burn-out who would shoot yourself in the dick seven times in a row with a smile if you knew somewhere in the world, a teenage girl was gonna _CRY_ about it. Did I miss anything?”

The last, faltering but persistent strand of overconfidence holding up Leon Heron’s smile snapped at the sound of distant, gathering screeches from outside.

“Right, forgot,” Masako corrected, unmoving except for the thumb she hooked casually back over her shoulder. “We also led a bunch of _those_ things here.”

Leon tapped at his control again, a fierce focus in his eyes, and from the sounds outside, Masako realized his action had been to launch several cyber-flies out from other parts of the building, the insectoid machines buzzing toward the reptilian horde scrambling across the pavement. The next set of sounds was more unclear, but from the appalled shock on Leon’s face, the Battra ranger could only picture the rapidly-silenced flies having been pulled out of the air at the ends of extendable, adhesive tongues.

“In a turn of events that surprised no one but the non-biologist.”

Scowling, Leon rushed right back to his control, but the moment was broken by an exploding shatter, the sound of a rock avalanche, and a screech similarly intoned, but far outclassing the skull-crawlers’ own in sheer, ear-splitting volume.

“… _Aaaaand_ there’s a big one, now. Just a guess.”

Nearing, thunderous footsteps of a lengthy stride approached at a rising tempo, and at the first missed beat, the entire command complex shook, as if stricken by an earthquake. Leon stumbled, the weight of his rifle throwing him off. Masako disappeared in a flash of red.

One after the other, Masako solidified midair at neck-level to the cyber-flies, the spikes on her right forearm prying through metal like a can opener. She remained in place only long enough to fully separate the antenna-bearing component of each machine from the rest of its body before moving on to the next, the twisting motion of her arm forming one complete, momentum-carrying rotation across four separate points in space.

Now solely cages of metal with wings halting still, the headless remains of the mechanical insects dropped like rolling weights to the floor, their captives shaken but unharmed.

Masako’s charging eyes found Leon’s face, but Professor Ando’s fist had found it first, the alleged business magnate slumping unconscious against the wall with blood dripping from his teeth.

Kristina pried Lucy free of the cyber-fly’s inactive but position-locked arms, while Shannon ran for Marcia and Shawn struggled to free Jason. Kyle and Professor Ando approached Jeremy, but the captive insisted on quickly kicking himself free of the mechanical legs before the others could lend their assistance.

The giant skull-crawler screeched from below, the continued shaking and a glance out the window revealing the immense reptile was currently clinging vertically to the protective cage by the strength of its two limbs. Regular-sized skull-crawlers rushed up all around it, and while most were still attempting to scale the lower levels, one of the creatures was already upon Masako to the point she leapt back through energy to avoid being caught in the rush of shattering glass. The reptile lunged straight through the bars of the cage, having far less trouble with the wider, triangular gaps, and planted its clawed feet on the floor of the room.

Masako heard it before she saw it – a coughing, but laughing, maniacal whisper of “How tragic…” as a bloodied, but conscious Leon aimed his multi-barreled rifle toward where Shannon and Kyle were guiding Marcia toward the exit.

At the exact same moment, the skull-crawler lashed out with its tongue, the forked, slimy pink appendage rapidly crossing the room toward Shawn.

One jump through lightning placed Masako already knocking the weapon from Leon’s hands with her left elbow, her right hand taking him by the wrist. The second jump pulled the man along within the transport aura, both of them spinning out into the path of the skull-crawler’s tongue.

Masako let Leon stumble backwards into the wrapping tendrils of the tongue’s fork, watching his shocked face as the pseudo-limbs caught around his waist and towed him along with a pulling force that tore him off his feet. The skull-crawler slung its tongue upward at the last moment, allowing the man to catch air before falling into the reptile’s open jaws.

The crocodilian mouth engulfed feet and legs, then snapped shut to the level of Leon’s shoulders, his ribcage crushed on impact with his head and arms hanging loose around the tip of the creature’s snout. The skull-crawler writhed low, then high again into another jaw-opening, upward toss, ready to swallow the man whole on the next gulp.

Masako wasn’t that merciful.

A pair of purple energy beams struck through the skull-crawler’s heart, striking it dead. Its left ankle gave out faster than its right, and the creature fell slumped to the side, with an impact that sent its half-chewed prey sliding partially from its toothy grasp.

With most of his torso crushed inward and gushing blood, the still-alive and convulsing Leon Heron was set upon quickly by three of the reptile’s Barem, and coughed up a concoction that seemed to include some of their acid as well as fragments of his own crushed and melted bones. Masako walked closer with slow steps, watching parts of him twitch, before finally letting loose red lighting from her hands – a barrage that reduced him and the Barem to ash, but acted slowly enough that most of Leon was still alive, aware, and physically unable to scream when the burning started.

She halfheartedly turned back to the others, hoping to get back on track with an escape route, but of course, she had to contend with the stares.

Most were unsettled, Lucy included, with a few, including Kyle and Marcia, looking as if they might wretch at any moment. Jason and Professor Ando seemed only slightly disturbed. Jeremy was frozen in fear. Shannon was _mortified_.

Masako sighed.

_Right. Actions have consequences. ‘Shannon will remember that,’ or whatever. Can never just have everything work out, can we?_

The rattling and roaring picked up, and Masako rounded with a pair of eye-beams, striking a second skull-crawler with a sustained blast that pushed it back out the window with a singed underside. While the ranger was occupied, two more of the reptiles leapt in to either side, clinging to the bars of the cage as they snapped their jaws and readied their tongues.

Masako held out her arms, prepared to split her focus, when a barrage of linear, precise red energy fire roared past her right ear, battering one of the skull-crawlers with burns and knockback power until it cried its last and dropped clear of the building. A second barrage to the left followed quickly, taking out the other creature as well. Startled, Masako turned back around, finding a sight that drew her brows completely to her hairline beneath an outwardly-static helmet.

If the rotary MASER had looked enormous in Leon’s arms, it looked _ridiculous_ in Lucy’s. With some difficulty, the lithe college student tilted the weapon high enough to blow smoke from the barrels.

Behind her, Kristina was backed against the edge of the doorway, with the widest, dumbest, blissful grin Masako had ever seen on a real person.

The facility rocked violently, a creature’s low growl reverberating enough for the vibrations to add to the shaking. The triangular, bottom profile of the big skull-crawler’s pointed head rose past the level view through the shattered window.

“Time to move!” Masako called out, running with gesturing hands to usher the others out through the room’s exit.

As they made their way through the segmented hallway, they could hear more skull-crawlers leaping into the room behind them, the taps of clawed footsteps carrying across the reverberating metal floor. Ahead of them was the last door frame before the outer shell of the complex seemed to end, giving way to a stone-wall passage carved into the cliff-face beyond.

As the last of the group crossed the threshold, Jeremy swerved off-course, boldly snatching the MASER rifle from Lucy and slamming the gun’s stock against the wall control for the doorway.

“We’re not gonna make it!” Jeremy screamed in fury, making a dive back through the closing door to seal himself in with the charging skull-crawlers. “Keep going, I’ll—”

_Oh, for fuck’s sake…_

“I’ll get him! Just go!”

Spinning on a heel, Masako braced her palms into the way of the edges of the closing doors, using her ranger strength to apply a burst of countering force that shattered the motor mechanisms within. With her right hand, she reached out and snatched Jeremy by the back of his shirt, tearing him backward while her left gauntlet sent a sustained blast of lightning into the floor. Traveling across the metal, the red, surging current stopped the two nearest skull-crawlers in their tracks, electrifying them on the spot.

At the passage’s far end, the giant crawler twisted its body, attempting to drive the conical wedge of its immense jaws between the metal beams of the protective cage. The renewed bout of shaking pulled a gap in the seam around the walls near Masako, where metal exterior met stone interior.

Throwing Jeremy aside against the left, stone wall, Masako stepped over to examine the gap, but it fell closed with a pause in the straining movement.

The Big One bared teeth, with parting jaws, through a cage opening it had buckled wider, but the brace still kept its mouth from opening wide enough to utilize its tongue. In fury, the creature shook the entire complex again in an attempt to further its progress.

Now, the seam pulled wider, and Masako leant forward, turning to take a viewing angle directly along the plane of the gap. Unobstructed, dozens of the thick, metal bolts that fixed the complex to the cliff face were laid out in her vision, pulled only partially from the rock.

Energy cackled over the Battra suit’s eyes, and the twin purple beams lashed out into the gap, melting through bolts or causing detonations in the rock they were embedded in. To Masako’s right the entirety of the facility was cut free from the cliffside, and as she swung the beams down and around to her left, she only needed to perform a partial upward cut before the remaining anchors all broke free at once.

Slowly, even as more standard-size skull-crawlers rushed down the hallway eager for a meal, the artificial part of the complex tilted backward, then fell faster. With a startled cry from the Big One, and several of disappointment from the small ones now standing at the other side of a too-far gap, the falling metal framework went horizontal and crashed to the airfield below with a loud, reverberating rattle through metal scaffold.

When the dust cleared, the Big One was alive, but struggling in vain to maneuver, pinned beneath the human structure with its jaws still caught in a metallic noose of the the now-wreckage.

Turning with a sigh, Masako wrenched the rotary MASER from Jeremy’s hands, holding it loosely by the scope-mount in her off-hand while she stared at the boy with a welling fire.

“That was stupid. That was _beyond_ stupid, and no matter what you might have been thinking, it _wasn’t a fucking apology_.”

“…You’re right,” Jeremy sneered a pained hiss, reluctantly at a loss as he turned his eyes away with a grimace. “Clearly, you had it handled.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Masako scolded, then paused. Taking several, slow breaths, she turned the last into a heavy, admitting sigh. “But I know why you did it, and as much as I hate to admit it, it’s not really _your_ fault, specifically.”

Jeremy waited a long moment before looking up in mild curiosity, shielded with a show of belittling, confused skepticism.

“I can hate you,” Masako said, the words blank of malice. “I can hate you all I want, I can justify it with rationales, priority of the innocent over the guilty… and if you’d pointed that gun any other direction, I would’ve been _right_ to. But the one thing I _can’t_ do is _blame_ you, not if I’m being honest with myself. At the end of the day, you’re only doing what the rest of the world told you to do.”

Her eyes left the still-confused boy resting against the wall, drifted over the void where the rest of the building used to be, and returned with focus as she pointed sharply at nothing but open air.

“ _That_ … that was making it about you. That was taking the easy way out of responsibility. Forcing others to think highly of you, out of the one kind of respect you can earn by doing something with anger. That was about you being right, because you’re _not allowed to be wrong_.”

Masako dropped to a knee, a forearm resting over the other as she leaned over Jeremy.

“I’m not asking, I’m begging, for _your_ sake. Learn. To be. Wrong. Because once you can, then you don’t have to _BE_ every single fucking mistake you’ve ever made. They can be what they’re supposed to be, _mistakes_ , instead of a part of you that you have to _defend_. Don’t let your pride turn you into a monster you _literally do not have to be_.”

She pointed the other direction, farther down the hallway, and tilted her head.

“Those people? Your friends? They’re more important than being right, and saying you’re sorry is how you let them know that. How you let _yourself_ know you have something worth changing for.”

She held her hand forward, palm open with an offer.

Jeremy took it.

  


* * *

  


Pushing further through the mountain, the passage was collapsed in places, the only intact route leading to a slight upward slope in the direction of storm-dulled sunlight. There were still clouds in the sky when Masako and Jeremy stepped into open air, but it was the clearest the island had been since any of them had arrived upon it.

The others were gathered where the passage had let out, in a small fissure of bare dirt and stone bordered in places by higher, grass-covered ledges around it. The wall on the far side was continuous, and more than a meter tall, but the nearer side had enough gaps to provide a view back over the mountain, where parts of the airfield and rocky bay were visible beyond it.

Sat upon larger boulders, many clearly exhausted and shaken out of their wits, the students seemed to snap back to reality only when joined by the last of their party. Shannon refused to meet Masako’s eyes, but from beneath the embrace of one of her arms, Marcia managed to.

The professor was farther to the east, adjusting his glasses as he tried to discern something in the distance below.

The were on the highest curve of a rounded hill, with the fissure extending into downhill passages on either side. To the east, that fissure became a moderately steep ravine between higher rocks, with enough of a visible straight-shot downhill that Masako could barely make out a small boardwalk installation set up in what appeared to be a hidden-away corner of the same rock-surrounded harbor that connected to both the airfield and the ocean.

There was a boat.

A _yacht_ , specifically. At least that answered the question of how… that wannabe real-life Captain Planet villian, whose name Masako had already forgotten, had both arrived at the island and had intended to leave.

And if Dagahra stayed asleep long enough, now it was how Professor Ando’s Kaiju Investigation Team was going to leave.

There were footsteps in the gravel beside her.

“If Cameron Winter is selling off cyber-flies…” Shawn began, with mounting, existential worry.

“Then the Xiliens’ kaiju handouts just got a lot more dangerous,” Masako completed with a nod, “but that’s not a mystery we can solve from this island. That boat down there’s our exit.”

Masako found she could almost be _proud_. The end was in sight, and all her charges were accounted for. She wasn’t sure _when_ they’d become her responsibility, but she wasn’t going to think about that right now, because _suck it_ , horror movies. She was here, alive, with the professor and all…

…all _seven_ students.

_Fuck. Who’smissingwho’smissingwho’s—_

By the panic in her eyes, Kristina had noticed Masako’s alarmed posture and realized before the ranger had, but it was again, Kyle who said it aloud.

“Where’s Lucy?”

“She…” Kristina was clearly struggling with distress, but she was putting the pieces together. “We saw on the monitors. When it came ashore, that place…”

“I recognized it from the miniature,” said Jason, with a calmer but still worried tone. “It’s not far. Lucy could have made the connection too.”

“What are you talking about?” Jeremy spoke for the first time since the tunnel, the words laced with genuine interest and concern.

Groaning to herself, with the sound breaking into overwhelmed frustration midway, Kristina slapped a palm to her left temple, only wincing slightly at the tension the gesture must have put on her piercings. “She’s going to get footage of Dagahra.”

Masako tensed and shook with a low grumble, but relaxed into a sigh. “I’ll go get her.”

Kristina was less than a meter away, staring coldly and fearlessly into the Battra ranger’s lenses in an instant. “I’m going with you.”

It was an intensity that simply couldn’t be argued with. “ _I believe you_ ,” Masako said instead, with a nod of both agreement and respect.

She turned, then, to the others, eyes drifting past to size up the defensibility of the ravine leading to the dock before focusing finally on the professor.

“The rest of you are getting on that boat, and staying hidden until we’re back.” She held out her left hand, lazily offering the MASER rifle held within. “Who wants this.”

Professor Ando claimed the weapon, though seemingly only to avoid the responsibility falling to any of his students. He held it with an almost familiarity, though, shooting back a smile. “It _should_ be simple enough to figure out.”

Masako had one last command, angling her neck sharply. “Jason, I’m counting on you to make sure that boat’s safe. I wouldn’t rule out sabotage… or gross neglect.”

Jason nodded with understanding, then took a moment to plug Kristina’s phone into his larger camera, transferring over a zoomed-in view of one of the pictures of the island model. “You’ll want to go down the other side of the hill, and out through another valley. This path here.”

“Got it,” Kristina memorized before Masako had a chance to. She turned to the ranger, a questioning, possibly nervous look on her face. “So… are we going to do that… that thing?”

Masako took note of the route, judged the distance down the west-facing side of the hill, and threw her arm around Kristina before sending them both surging forward in a bolt of red lightning.

The immense leaps across space carried them down the slope and through most of another wide valley, bordered by mountains on both sides. On the third, however, they exited the energized state with Masako’s ranger armor beginning to spark and surge with overtaxed expenditure.

“Guess it does have its limits,” the ranger voiced aloud, holding still and a step’s distance from Kristina until the surging fizzled out.

_ BATTRA WOULD RECOMMEND GIVING THE ABILITY A REST, ESPECIALLY AS YOU NOW APPROACH DAGAHRA, AND MAY NEED IT SHORTLY. _

_Noted_ , Masako thought with an eye-roll, before turning to Kristina with a helmet-tilt of apology.

“We can’t be far now,” Kristina stated hurriedly, content not to press the issue. She set off through the remaining stretch of rocks and still-drying mud, as quickly as she could without burning out.

Masako caught up, pulling slightly ahead as they approached the narrower ravine that formed the last leg of the planned route. It was clogged up with a recent rockslide that created a steeper upslope into the gap and, presumably, a similar downslope on the other side, but it was climbable without crawling, and probably not the sort of thing that would have stopped Lucy even if it wasn’t.

Testing the rocks, Masako found a stable route, Kristina following behind. The other girl was breathing heavily, which was to be expected, but something about it was intoned differently, more severely, than a simple physical exhaustion.

“You good?” Masako inquired, half under her breath.

Kristina was quiet for a while, continuing to take large step after large step up the rocks, but when one of her exhales cracked into a quiet whimper, something seemed to break all at once. 

“She _always_ does this!” Kristina snapped, more distraught than critical. “At first it was just… brave. Enthusiastic. You know how we all get about our work… some of us, at least. Before, it wasn’t even real, proper-sized daikaiju, and… a lot of the time, I was right there with her, too! But when it’s again and again, every time, it starts to feel like… like _I don’t know!_ It’s one thing when getting the footage, or just getting to see the creatures up close, is the most important thing to her, but sometimes I worry that maybe it’s… _the most important thing to her_.”

Masako processed that, clearing the highest group of boulders blocking the gap. There was a downslope, also navigable, but the ravine curved too far to the right to see anything past it even from the vantage.

“I’m not… even sure she knows how I feel about her,” Kristina confessed, her voice small and solemn. “I haven’t really been overt, I guess. Maybe I’m afraid to be. I don’t… know what she wants, how much she wants… If where we are right now isn’t… _clear_ to her, then she’s probably expecting something I can’t…”

Kristina paused, her audible pattern of movement growing more focused and cautious. “Sorry. I get it. Not a heart-to-heart.”

Masako stopped briefly on a boulder that only wobbled slightly. “I actually don’t mind,” she spoke quickly through a single breath, considering as she began moving again. “It helps.”

“Helps with… _what_ , exactly?” Kristina asked, skepticism in her voice.

Ahead, the runoff from the landslide and the stones already on the ground mixed to a more level path around the final turn. “Helps me justify to myself why I’m so determined to save you.”

Kristina was silent for a few more steps. “Let me guess… you share _Battra’s_ opinion on humanity as a whole?”

Masako sighed, readying her voice in the closest she could manage to complete deadpan.

“I’ve spent the last six years bashing heads in on the streets to protect my friends from beatings and acid attacks. I have trouble emotionally relating to anyone who’s lost fewer than five close loved ones to targeted killings. Sympathy for human life in general disappears somewhere around the fifteenth time you’ve seen a guy happily married with a wife and kids pull a knife on someone you care about like he doesn’t even think it’s murder. So _yeah_ , Battra and I get along fine.”

That bought almost a full minute of silent walking.

“…It sounds like you’re using other people’s trauma as a punchline.”

Masako had to stop at that. _“What?”_

Kristina carried on a few more steps until she was side-by-side with Masako. There was a hesitance in her expression, but also something bleak, that felt all too familiar. “Maybe I’m… not _right_ in the middle of it like you are, but it’s not like it doesn’t hurt!”

Wide and shaken blue eyes stared deeply into red lenses, almost as if gazing past the armor entirely to meet the broken soul beneath.

“I know what goes on out there, and… yeah, I tune out when I can, because… I don’t need to spend my whole life _grieving_ for people I’ve never met, but still feel like I _know_ on a level so deep there aren’t even words for it. Maybe you’d think that’s the same thing as letting it happen, but _one person_ can’t bear the weight, the _pain_ , of every last evil in the world, not even you!” She took a breath, then calmed, taking a chance with a weak smile and reaching a hand to Masako’s shoulder. “I guess what I’m saying is… I _care_. And it’s not some empty thing, either.”

Masako shuddered, but sighed, her voice faint as her armor rippled, the metallic layers pulling away for her first, unfiltered breath of island air.

“I believe you.”

Kristina smiled, and pulled Masako close, the warmth in the embrace the same sort of bleak, knowing kind she’d once felt only among outcasts.

When they drew apart, Kristina took in Masako’s unsure stance with a gentle frown. “For someone who talks so much about your friends, you seem really alone.”

Masako caught her own averting gaze, slackened, and met the other girl’s eyes with a sigh. “I don’t… get close… anymore.”

Kristina saw through the words with not a moment’s doubt, a faint, sad smile turning the corner of her dark lips. “Maybe it’s okay to try again?”

Masako shook her head, the spreading frost of ranger armor coating her body once more. “Let’s take care of you first.”

She moved to start walking again, but stopped, passing one last glance back at Kristina.

“Lucy cares a lot about you, trust me. Don’t be afraid to be honest with her. She would listen.”

  


* * *

  


The ravine narrowed to the pointed end of a fracture, with barely enough room for one person to squeeze through at a time before opening to a rounded, grassy cliff overlooking the valley and inlet below. Dagahra rested halfway up from the beach, the flattish curves of his stowed wings casting shadows on grass and sand. His reptilian skin was a brilliant aquamarine under the gently cloud-filtered sun, the beige-gold of his fins like polished sandstone.

Lucy was about halfway from the rocks to the cliff’s edge, her camcorder focused in as the slumbering beast’s body rose and fell from slow breathing.

Masako lingered near the crumbled stone around the entrance, gesturing Kristina forward.

“Hey, Lucy…” the pink-haired girl greeted with a shaky smile, crossing the distance at a stride that passed for casual. Her glance at Dagahra wasn’t entirely one of fear and worry, but she didn’t allow herself to linger.

“Kristina!” Lucy yelped in surprise, lowering her camera for a short moment as she perked up. She looked over with a bright smile as her friend joined her, then pointed excitedly. “Look! I’ve never seen one up close before!” She leveled her camera once again, staring down the viewfinder. “He’s beautiful, _regal_. Body characteristics of both reptiles and fish, similar to Titanosaurus. The hind legs look semi-vestigial for walking, and probably aid more in swimming, and if I’m remembering right, those shoulder points are part of the Barem production system.”

Indulging Lucy for another look at the sleeping kaiju, Kristina nodded. “It really is the view of a lifetime… but we need to go, Lucy.”

“Just a minute!” Lucy readjusted her camera. “He adjusted his tail a few times, I think I might get a better look at those flukes! I can’t tell if they’re horizontal or vertical yet…”

Kristina’s left hand was on Lucy’s shoulder, and with a moment’s hesitation, she stretched her right arm to faintly touch the line of Lucy’s jaw. “I know, but… we really need to go, now.”

Her guiding motion didn’t seem to need any force, but when Lucy’s head was turned, the fingers stayed, there being no objection from wide, soft and attentive eyes.

Kristina smiled, through what seemed to be several kinds of fear wearing on her nerves. “For _me_ , okay? Just this once?”

Lucy breathed softly, blinking, then ever-so-slowly lowered her camcorder, closing it without looking. Her left hand caught Kristina’s as it left her face, already reaching for the fingers she curled into her own.

Dagahra shifted with a snort of air.

Masako rolled her eyes and stood from behind a boulder, waving the others over quickly. Lucy backed away, Kristina more ready to run but not letting go of the other girl’s hand.

Kicking up dust when he planted his palms, Dagahra lifted himself on muscular forelimbs, yellow eyes opening with an immediate, unsettling air of murderous intent.

“He’s… not controlled anymore, right?” Kristina asked, shaking.

Masako dragged them both back a few more steps by their backpacks, rounding to place herself in front. “Maybe not… but he’s still _Dagahra_.”

Dagahra roared to the heavens, a deep, warbling growl escaping his throat.

“RUN!” Kristina yelled, dragging along Lucy as the two turned back down the ravine.

Masako followed closely, judging the difficulty of the landslide blocking the way. She lunged at the others’ backs, wrapped her arms and wings around them both on either side, and carried all three through a red bolt of lightning.

The jump cleared the steeper slopes and deposited them at the opposite end of the ravine, but Masako’s armor sizzled with sparks – fainter than last time, but a warning nonetheless.

“Damn! Still on recharge!”

Hearing the rumble of disturbed earth from close behind them, they made a break for it, running clear out into the wide valley. Masako scanned for an opening to the sea to call her zord, still unsure it would arrive quickly enough even if its repairs had completed.

Dagahra leapt over the dividing hill, planting a foot on either side of the ravine and bellowing again from his perch. As he marched along the higher ground, his weight finally took its toll on the mountain, the rock below it breaking into another landslide that carried the sea dragon sliding out into the valley behind his prey.

Masako brought light to her eyes, ready to simply turn and bombard the immense kaiju with all the power she had, when the ground in front of the fleeing party was broken, with force, by a sudden geyser of rock and dust.

In the confusion as the three stumbled to a stop, the only clear sight amid the falling debris was the unmistakable, bone-white headplate of a giant-sized skull-crawler, jaws snapping in the air.

_No, no, no! Not now!_

_No way out, no way…_

Except, the crawler was writhing unnaturally in the dust, its whole body thrown about violently from side to side. As the sound of falling rocks faded, the sound of crushing, snapping bones took its place, one of the reptile’s legs scrambling futilely against the locked vice of reflective, violet-maroon mechanical jaws.

With a wild throw of the machine’s neck, the battered and limp skull-crawler slammed into the foot of a mountain on the north side of the valley, rolling back down until it fell still. With a metallic roar, and another series of head-shakes, the hinging panels of lobster-claw-shaped ears helped clear the remainder of the dust, revealing the metallic quadruped in all its stout, adorably fierce glory.

 _“Sorry I’m late!”_ Yuzo shouted through the zord’s external speakers. _“Did I miss anything important?”_

Still closing at a steady pace, Dagahra let out an attention-grabbing growl, narrow-eyeing the new arrival with more skepticism than caution.

The Baragon Zord’s upward-curving nasal horn flickered with an orange glow, and Masako spread her wings over Lucy and Kristina, pushing them to the ground and shielding them from the radiating waves of heat as a beam of condensed flame shot forth from the zord’s jaws.

Dagahra recoiled from the blast, his aquatic flesh singed but his resolve unshaken. A loud bellow pierced the sky before he looked upon the maroon machine with fierce, irritated wrath.

To the northwest, another zord stealthily scrambled up a mountain on a similar quadrupedal frame, plated in bronze with a single row of long, narrow, almost sickle-like silver spines forming a short row on its head, and lining the rest of its body from base of the neck to the tip of the tail. As it leapt from the peak, a copper, metallic film stretched out from its sides to its wrists and ankles, allowing the machine to glide like a flying squirrel.

The Varan zord caught air to some distance above Dagahra, then retracted is gliding wings and curled into ball, surrounded in the row of spines and beginning to spin like a buzzsaw. Dropping hard on an unaware Dagahra’s back, just between his shoulders, the zord drew blood and a rage-filled scream from the sea dragon, before propelling out of the spin in a gliding leap that carried it in a curving path along the south mountain range and back around to face the creature head-on.

Shielded some several hundred meters behind the Varan zord, the Baragon zord leant forward, dropping its head to the ground. “ _Get on, I’ll take you to your friends_ ,” Yuzo broadcast from the cockpit, the voice heard only just well enough under the more distant, metallic roar of challenge from the other machine.

Taking hold of the other two, Masako energy-leapt the three of them the short distance to the zord’s back, taking a shielded spot in the small dip between two of the machine’s prominent, horizontal dorsal ridges. They settled in with braced limbs as the zord leant back upright and turned on its feet, beginning with a gentle, speedy trot away from the ensuing battle.

“You didn’t tell me you… knew Baragon!” Kristina yelled at the top of her lungs, between the impacts of the zord’s now-galloping stride. “I can’t believe I’m… _riding_ on Baragon!” She paused through a few more leaps. “Well, the Baragon _zord_ , I guess…”

“Technically,” Masako countered with the same volume, smiling beneath her faceplate, “I actually did confirm… the other rangers can hear their kaiju. Baragon’s in the head of the ranger… who’s in the head of the zord… so we _are_ riding Baragon right now!”

“So, what do you think, Kristina?” Lucy yelled across Masako, who was securing them both from the middle. “Second best moment of your life?”

“Hell yeah!” Kristina cheered, throwing her unoccupied hand up in a fist, before looking back with a sudden, reflective confusion. “Wait, what’s the first?”

Lucy smiled fiercely. “Wanna go out with me?”

 _“Baragon didn’t know he had so many fans!”_ Yuzo broadcast from the front of the zord. _“Also, we’re talking again. Hold on, I’m taking us down!”_

The Baragon zord slowed momentarily, its forelimbs setting to work raking their heavy claws through rock. It didn’t burrow completely underground, but rather, dug an open-air, sloping ditch that cut the corner of the sheer cliff face, leaving a new, zord-width ravine that carried them more gently down to the airfield below.

The yacht had left the hidden-away dock and was waiting in the open, just at the edge of the water, aligned parallel to the shore. The Baragon zord skidded to a slow-enough stop at the edge, and Masako struck a short jump to carry herself and her passengers on-board.

“Okay, everyone else, it is _your_ responsibility to stay rational, calm, and collected,” Masako ordered, before gesturing vaguely to Lucy and Kristina. “These two here are suffering from a case of _horrible timing_ , and will be of little help at the present moment.” She looked through the window to the cabin, where Jason and Shawn were busy looking over the many, many controls. “Can either of you two drive a boat?”

Shawn mouthed something through the glass that Masako really hoped wasn’t _we’ll know in a minute_ , and pulled a lever to start the motor. Thankfully, the yacht turned slowly to face out toward sea, and began pulling away from the airfield’s edge.

With hundred-meter-high rock spires rising on either side, some intruding in from the edges and creating uneven, alternating gaps the farther from the shore they reached, the harbor was one with many open spaces of water, but a relatively narrow direct path out to sea. The boat was aligned on the proper course to thread the needle, but had yet to reach even a quarter of the distance across the first, roughly circular pool.

Dagahra crested the cliff on the opposite side, the Varan zord struggling in his jaws. The dragon bit down on the machine’s midsection, eyes widening as he seemed to acquire a taste for the metal.

The Varan zord swiped with a set of silver claws that drew blood from Dagahra’s neck, and the pained dragon shook the would-be-meal side-to-side several times before throwing it against the cliffside that once held the command complex. Planting a foot around the rocky ledge on either side of the trench Baragon had dug, Dagahra heaved himself forward on two limbs, leaping fully from the higher ground and landing with a sparking, metal-twisting crash on the grounded remains of the command structure itself.

The Baragon zord made a half-turn, parallel to the shore with its neck on an angle toward the sea dragon, and fired its beam, the flames spreading to a plume of fire as they washed over Dagahra’s chest and throat. The dragon roared high, and dropped low, aiming his shoulder ports toward his opponent and discharging from each a missile-like burst of Barem-infused red smoke. The attacks struck the Baragon zord’s front and back hip on its right side, knocking it clear off the airfield’s edge and splashing down into the water beyond.

Unimpeded, Dagahra began marching, again dragging himself forward on strong, planting forelimbs while his rear, water-prioritizing limbs kept up with a knee-walking style of primitive locomotion. His jaws and shoulder spikes cackled with crimson energy, evil eyes finding the small boat among the waves.

Something disturbed the water between the Baragon zord’s splashdown and the fleeing yacht, moving perpendicular to the small boat’s path and battering it with light, rippling waves. Writhing like an eel, a snake-like form slithered just below the surface of the harbor, shimmering a bright emerald through the vibrant blue water.

On a neck segmented into connected, flattish squares, the wedge-shaped head of the Manda zord broke the water, roaring a challenge with its lower jaw hinging down from where it was nested, nearly flush, within the lower surface of the upper. Two large horns jutted backward from the widest point of the wedge, creating a shape like the point of an arrow, with two shorter, smaller horns fitted in parallel just behind them.

Dagahra eyed the partially-surfaced serpent with hesitance, but belittlement, looking distinctly unimpressed as the wavering length of the rest of its body floated to the surface from neck to tail.

The Baragon zord leapt from the water just behind, throwing its front legs over the slack of Manda’s body and resting half-out of the water like one would upon a pool noodle. A curved horn flashed, and another heat beam struck across the water’s surface back to shore, bathing Dagahra in fire.

Dagahra ducked low once more, opening both his jaws and the beak-like halves of his shoulder spikes, and pouring forth three crimson beams laced with lightning-volts of pure black. The combined blast struck the water just ahead of the two zords, knocking the Baragon zord back into the harbor and throwing the lighter Manda zord several dozen meters into the air.

Roaring, and without hesitation, Dagahra leapt into the water, and sunk below the surface.

It was only moments before the Yacht beneath Masako’s feet was being drawn backward, its progress reversing as the currents shifted and strengthened. The waterspout began anew at the spot of the dragon’s descent, rising skyward and drawing dark clouds back over the island.

Rain poured and thunder struck, and as the three zords recovered and readied to engage, the base of the cyclone, just below the water’s surface, cackled aglow with crimson.

The Manda zord lunged in an arc across the boat’s stern, just as a wide ring of pure crimson energy began below the waves and broke through the surf. Traveling like a flying saucer, the attack created its own, minor whirlpooling currents beneath it as it skimmed the surface toward its target.

The metallic serpent took the hit, letting loose a metallic screech as it dropped below the waterline. From what Masako could tell, the zord had taken no serious physical damage, but the energy attack had left it with some sort of glow as it sank deeper.

Dodging lightning, the Varan zord glided through the storm, but was struck out of the sky by another of Dagahra’s energy rings sent skyward. Baragon crawled upon a smaller rock mound that wasn’t quite a spire, but was struck off it just as quickly. With more crimson energy building, the cyclone prepared to deliver more of its energetic fury to attackers from all sides.

Masako and the others had no time to prepare, or even to properly observe, and could only weather the winds and harsh waves that rocked the yacht as the second cyclone surged past. Traveling from prow to stern and beyond, the smaller, narrower waterspout moved at breakneck speeds across the harbor, kicking up surf as it made a beeline for the larger funnel and slammed into it head-on.

The collision immediately dispersed the winds from both weather anomalies, leaving only clearing air and churning waters in their wake, while the spinning and disoriented sea dragon floated to the surface and slowed to a wavering halt.

Then the music started.

Well… Masako could only _very generously_ categorize it as music. The grating sound that filled the air, blasting from distant speakers and warring strikingly with the raging storm, was a thing that could only ever be described as a heavily-sampled, electronically-distorted, blatantly misogynistic white boy rap song.

At the farthest end of the rocks where the harbor met the sea, the Titanosaurus zord stood tall, slamming a fist to a palm in time with the beat. On the last impact, it leant its long neck forward, then threw its entire upper body back, narrow crocodilian jaws cackle-roaring skyward.

_Fuckin’ party rangers…_

The Titanosaurus zord swiped its tail side to side, rapidly moving another waterspout behind it from its right to its left, all while Dagahra’s frustrated eyes attempted to follow it. After a convincing fakeout to the right, the zord swiftly moved it left again and sent it forward, rocking the other side of the fleeing yacht as it brushed past it to collide with Dagahra.

Shaken and knocked back by the winds, the sea dragon recovered, shoulder cannons brought to bear as twin shells of red smoke thundered through the air and struck the bright, metallic brick-red zord in the gold plates of its chest.

The demersal saurian machine recoiled from the impacts, one near its right shoulder and one near its waistline, but stood firm. With clawed, mechanical hands, it scraped the harmless distributions of Barem from the thick metal plating, shaking off its fingers into the water with a slow, taunting ambivalence.

Snarling and lashing his finned tail to propel himself forward to meet the new adversary, Dagahra split the water like a speeding cargo ship, head and stowed wings held above the surf.

Swaying its neck with a cackle and winding up its fists for a beating, the Titanozord broke out into a longstepping, wading run through the harbor, and Shawn quickly swerved the boat right, taking it far out of the way of the charging titans.

On approach, Dagahra dove suddenly below the surface, remaining submerged while Titanosaurus took several more long strides. At the point the monsters were to cross, a linear series of red energy lances fired directly upward from beneath the water.

As the zord was still recoiling from the multiple strikes to its throat and left flank, Daghara shot upward out of the water, curving midair to face the left side of the towering, saurian machine. Muscular arms took hold of the Titanosaurus zord’s left shoulder and the back of its neck below the fin, as Dagahra fell and twisted over the right shoulder in an attempt to topple the machine with his own weight. The zord nearly fell, but reached back with its slender, mechanical arms instead, grabbing the sea dragon to flip him completely over and forward.

A wide, cup-like geyser marked Dagahra’s rough collision with the water, but the sea dragon rolled himself over with a simple writhing twist among the spreading waves. Leaping up with lunging, open jaws, Dagahra was met with a left hand tight around its throat while a mechanical right arm sent a sharp jab into his scaly chest. Freed from the hand by the force of the punch, Dagahra fell upon a powerful uppercut to the chin, somersaulting backwards from the force and falling toward the waves of the harbor once again.

A writhing tail cracked like a whip, smacking the Titanozord off its feet as well. They both stumbled into recovery but Dagahra struck first, a powerful triple-beam sending out spirals of crimson and magenta lightning to converge on the mechanical titan’s breastplate.

Titanosaurus shot backward through the water, the larger and lower of the replica’s dorsal fins cutting the harbor like a knife. Propelled like a projectile with a southeast heading, the zord careened toward Masako and the others on their stolen, evading yacht, now veering into a smaller sector of water out and to the right of the first.

Breaking the harbor’s surface with a solid wall of quickly-rising water, the Baragon and Varan zords leapt upon two small, rounder-topped rock formations, the Manda zord held in both their jaws and stretched between them to cross the path of the approaching Titanozord.

Before it could reach the fleeing boat, the red, gold, and orange mech’s back fin was caught in the metal serpent’s slack, stretching the Manda zord backward like a rubber band as the two saurian quadrupeds strained their necks and dug in their claws. At the rearmost point of the catch, the Titanozord drew back its right arm and made a fist.

The Baragon and Varan zords wrenched their heads forward again, pairing the sharp tug with the slingshot recoil of the Manda zord to throw the Titanosaurus zord back across the water. As if rebounding from a boxing ring, the Titanozord threw the momentum behind its traveling punch, socking Dagahra in the face with enough force to crack bone and flip the immense beast on his side.

The spreading wave from the creature’s fall caught the boat with a rough shake, but their course endured. Masako took another count of everyone aboard, noticing as Kyle made sure to do the same. Though the storm had weakened past thunder, the rain seemed to swell with purpose, at the same time the music did.

The Titanosaurus zord had Dagahra held against the side of a rock spire, using a left fist to pummel the dragon’s head against the stone, three times to the introductory beat of the chorus. Reaching with its right hand, the zord snatched the dragon roughly by his left head fin, and bashed his skull against a different spire through the next part, until the rock formation shattered all the way through on the fourth impact.

Dagahra managed to hook the claws on his left foot into the remaining base of the spire, rising with his teeth hungering to tear through metal, but the Titanosaurus zord brought both its arms skyward, bashing two fists into the top of the dragon’s head before spinning into a kick that impaled three toe claws into the side of Dagahra’s neck and sent the creature tumbling back to the water.

Then, the zord doubled forward with impressive balance, biting into Dagahra’s upper jaw with its own metal jaws. The machine thrashed the sea dragon dramatically back and forth as the final part of the chorus built, before snapping back upright with enough power to lift Dagahra clear out of the sea and into the sky. The zord then performed a dexterous full-body spin to slap the dragon hard with its opened fin-tail, sending Dagahra fully into a crash-landing against the tarmac of the airfield.

With the kaiju down for the count, the Titanosaurus zord rounded and stood upright, its upper body splitting apart and collapsing the head and tail inward with a similar pattern to the Godzilla zord. The split halves of both orange fins retracted almost completely into the rest of its metal frame, leaving ridge details on its back and at shallow, down-sloping angles on either side of the megazord head – which had a small, orange, fin-like crest of its own.

Both the Baragon and Varan zords extended across the middles of their torsos, revealing large universal joints between the separated front and back halves of their bodies. As they leapt in the air, their hind legs retracted and tails curved to form bulky shoulders, with Baragon’s ridges and Varan’s row of spines acting as detail on the front-facing side of each. The front ends of their bodies rotated one-hundred-eighty degrees on the joints, heads hinging away into chests under shielding pairs of paws while fists slid out to replace them. Baragon’s ridges and Varan’s spikes graced the undersides of the megazord’s forearms, Baragon on the right and Varan on the left.

The Manda zord was the last to arrive, flattening to its full length as it mounted itself horizontally on the megazord’s back. Just behind the serpent’s front legs and just ahead of the hind legs, the zord split, lengthy handles unsheathing from the hollow tube of the middle section. The small limbs aligned outward, but angled forward at the elbows and knees like the secondary blades of sais, forming the crossguards of two long, narrow swords formed by the serpent’s neck and tail. In the Baragon hand, the right blade bore the arrow-tip point of Manda’s head and horns, while in the Varan hand, the left blade ended in a multi-spiked spade-tip not unlike that of the Anguirus sword.

Dagahra stumbled, righting himself with strained effort as the flapping, loosened curves of his stowed wings kicked up dust from the rubble. Even as he stood on weakened joints, his eyes were fire, and as the megazord posed dramatically for the continuing battle, the dragon took to the air.

With wings extended, Dagahra crossed the harbor in a sustained glide, his toothy jaws nearly looking smug as his massive form made haste for the megazord. His mouth and shoulder spikes all snapped open, bombarding the combined machine with three spiral rays of magenta-crimson.

Megazord Titano crossed the twin Manda swords in front of itself, the point of intersection taking the hit from the converging beams. The megazord was pushed several hundred meters backward from the sheer force, sliding ahead of the advancing sea dragon, but took only minimal damage from dispersing bolts of energy lightning.

The Manda swords took on a coloration intermediate between the two shades of energy that had struck it, glowing with absorbed power. The moment the attack was halted, and Dagahra pulled up to gain altitude over his opponent, the megazord faked a backward-leaning dodge and reversed with a quick overhead swipe of the left blade, leaving a long, sparking gash in Dagahra’s underside from the base of the neck to the right thigh.

Dagahra faltered in the air, tilting precariously and nearly colliding with a more distant rock spire before righting himself and banking into a wide curve. Gaining height into the clouds enclosing the sky above, the dragon returned with a vengeance, shoulder cannons firing off alternating bursts of energetic thunder in a long strafing run toward the megazord’s position.

The megazord swung both its arms with a moderate level of precision, blocking and absorbing several of the energy attacks but missing others. One attack struck hard into its left shoulder, tipping the machine into a partial stumble while the right arm struggled to intercept the next two.

The yacht was almost clear of the final pair of spires, twin formations creating a loose gateway to the sea beyond. Masako was leaning tensely on the back rail, looking out over the vessel’s spreading wake and keeping herself as a wall between the others and the battle behind them.

For what little that would do against a giant-sized kaiju.

Or a giant-sized screwup from the idiots in the zords.

“It doesn’t look like they’re doing too well…”

Turning around, Masako found Lucy the next level up, braced between the railing bars of the higher balcony section attached to the cabin. Kristina was at her side, hands keeping tight hold of Lucy’s free one from two separate routes around the bar between them. Lucy’s other hand was holding the orange camcorder, strapped securely to her wrist, but while she appeared to have once been filming the battle in earnest, she wasn’t watching the viewfinder anymore, the device lowered to reveal the worried look in her attentive eyes.

Masako looked back, and the equation was a simple one. Dagahra could fly, giving the airborne sea dragon a significant range advantage over the grounded, melee-focused megazord.

The one counter the machine seemed to possess was a move where it drew its swords back to align past the opposite shoulders, then forcefully scraped them out against one another, sending an x-shape of magenta-red energy arcs up into the air toward Dagahra. The passing dragon took the hit in the right flank, drifting off course with smoke pouring from the wound but regaining composure quickly, and the attack had used up all that remained of the energy the two swords had collected, reducing the blades to bare, emerald green metal once again.

“We’ll be okay,” said Lucy, drawing Masako’s attention away from her thoughts and to the faint smile on the girl’s face as she softly nodded.

“I’ll keep her out of trouble,” Kristina assured, with a slightly teasing smirk.

_I hadn’t even planned that far out yet but okay. Here goes nothing, I guess._

Red lightning struck upward from beside the boat, and Masako held her breath until she could see her zoid forming fully, with both wings completely intact. With a smirk of her own, she launched herself into the cockpit, taking the controls and punching it toward the battle.

Dagahra roared a challenge, diving on a steep diagonal with his shoulder cannons open and firing.

The megazord braced, left sword taking the hits while the right sword readied behind for a probably useless swing into the air.

Masako tapped the communication channel online.

“Hey losers, need a lift?”

The Battra zord’s legs slotted into the megazord’s back, locking the smaller machine in place with lightning-patterned wings extending far out past the shoulders. With a power boost from the combination, Masako’s zord lifted the rest of the gestalt quickly up and forward, flying on closing intercept with the surprised and momentarily stunned sea dragon.

“Hell yeah!” screamed a snide, douchey voice Masako already didn’t like. The readied swing of the right blade became a javelin-like stab, hooking overhand as the megazord banked to catch up with Dagahra’s last-ditch attempt to pull higher.

Energized in a reddish hue, the right-hand sword plunged down the open barrel of Dagahra’s right shoulder cannon, the kaiju wailing from the pain.

With momentum still carrying the opponents past one another, they twisted a fraction of a turn in the air before the megazord wrenched away the bade, the Manda horns behind the sword’s tip catching like a barb and tearing out a large chunk of flesh that included the lower half of the cannon’s cone shell. Dagahra had been yanked toward a nose-dive, and nearly collided with a mountain before skipping off the side with his forelimbs and curving back into the air.

The megazord was faster with Masako at the wings, spinning toward the wounded dragon and crossing its blade-arms. The last of the absorbed energy was used up in another cross-wave attack, the x-shaped projectile hitting dead center on the shoulder injury and sending the kaiju careening with a dangerous tilt. Dagahra bellowed with rage, and angled skyward, punching through the remaining cloud layer and out of sight.

At Masako’s flight controls, the megazord ascended to match, the grey shadow over the island giving way to brilliant sunlight above. The upper surface of the cloud layer reflected crystal white like snow as the light washed over it, the same gleam brightening the metal of the combined machines to a nearly blinding shine.

The Manda swords rippled, then burned bright in a shade of starlike gold.

Dagahra swooped into view, giving off a startling, tooth-baring growl before dedicating his jaws to the buildup of energy. Twin spiral beams fired from the dragon’s mouth and intact left shoulder cannon, the Megazord dodging handily to the side but gaining speed into an intercept course.

Dagahra fired again and again, the megazord zig-zagging in two dimensions to avoid the attacks while retaining its speed on approach. As collision neared, Dagahra readied his head for a physical bite, the claws on his front legs raising forward in anticipation.

“Take us higher at the last second, then spin us in about face,” the douchey voice commanded with an implied smirk. “If you get what I’m saying.”

“On it,” Masako replied quickly, the moment in question only seconds away.

As the combatants closed in, Masako pulled up to pass overhead, then took Battra’s wings into a drift, spinning the megazord around to face backward and shift from prone to upright. The machine’s arms hefted the twin swords above its head, shining with golden light, and swung them both in sweeping, downward and backward cleaves.

The pendulum-style blades struck Dagahra just out past each of his shoulders, carrying through the opposing movement and slicing the dragon’s wings off completely. With a confused, pained roar, Dagahra began dropping out of the air, quickly sinking through the clouds.

The megazord dove, breaking back into the dispersing storm with the left, Varan arm extended forward while tossing the Manda tail sword briefly out of its grip. The Varan zord’s stowed front limbs hinged out from the top of the larger forearm, spreading like Rodan’s wings but incompletely, in more of a slingshot-style configuration. The Manda tail lowered into the gap, now horizontal and pointed like a spear, while a strand of orange energy supplied the tension for the endgame weapon.

The sword was launched downward, spearing Dagahra through the back and silencing his roar into the spinning vortex of collapsing matter transfer. The resulting, miniscule coin glinted small sparkles in the air, and the magazord gained speed, the Varan hand opening and catching the tiny artifact in the dark depths of its closing fist.

They pulled out of the dive, taking to a hover in a sunbeam as the stormclouds fragmented and gradually drifted away.

“Okay, that was awesome,” the douchey voice began, most likely the Titanosaurus ranger now that Masako was looking clearly at the other camera views. “You’re pretty good. Probably pretty hot, too. You know, if you ever want to…”

“I will DROP THIS MEGAZORD RIGHT NOW,” Masako rage-deadpanned, her finger hovering on the clamp release in full view of the camera.

The Titanosaurus ranger froze up, then slipped deceptively back into a casual posture, attempting to brush it off. " _Whoa_ there, okay, okay. Get the picture, but can’t blame a guy for trying—”

Masako released the clamps, and watched the combined mass of the other four zords fall over eight hundred meters to the ground below. The impact kicked up a dust cloud a mile wide and left a crater deep enough it might have made a new lake were it closer to the sea.

“I’m _really_ sorry about him…” Yuzo spoke over the channel just before Masako disconnected.

The Battra zord made a slow, gliding loop around Monster Island, energized wings discharging bolts of red lightning by the thousands. The storm rained down on clearing waters, cleansing the island of Barem while leaving the rest of the ecosystem intact. One fear-stricken giant octopus scrambled away from the onslaught, left unharmed even as Barem became miniscule vents of embers and steam all through the sea around it.

With the infection purged, the island calmed, and the other four zords climbing from the crater and leaving by way of the sea, Masako let out a long, relaxed sigh, set her chin in an elbow-supported palm, and allowed her own machine to drift aimlessly on air currents.

 _Do we… go home now?_ she asked aloud in her thoughts.

_ I SUPPOSE THE TASK IS FINISHED_, Battra supplied only a little helpfully.

_It doesn’t feel finished._

_ THEN SEE IT THROUGH. WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? _

Masako took the secluded moment to breathe away her nerves, her eyes finding and tracking the small, white shape of the distant, departing sea vessel. She considered following them along from above, to make sure nothing went wrong, but decided that was just plain rude.

Instead, she brought her pursuit closer alongside, a few hundred meters to the right of the yacht and roughly the same distance higher in the sky. Briefly, the two craft were connected by a thin, diagonal, red line of condensed, traveling energy.

The professor had found a slanting deck chair on the vessel’s starboard side, and upon Masako’s arrival, seemed to make at least a little effort to show that the purpose of his present reclining was to rest his injured leg. “You’re back,” he announced with little surprise.

Masako stood, realizing no one else had actually seen her yet. The designated pilots were occupied in the forward part of the cabin, while the rest of the students sheltered in the larger interior section were either facing away from the starboard windows or, in Lucy’s and Kristina’s case, fast asleep snuggled together under a single blanket.

Under her helmet, no one could see the way Masako smiled with more genuine warmth than she would ever admit. As for the knowledge of the occurrence, Battra would just have to deal.

“Not surprised to see me?” Masako joked as she leant casually against the outer railing. “I guess it makes sense. You _do_ seem to know more about ranger stuff than you’re letting on.”

If Professor Ando felt caught, he didn’t show it. Casually, he stood, and made his way over to the railing. Setting a tired hand down on the metal beam, he looked out into the water, he and Masako facing in opposite directions as he stayed quiet for another moment.

“I’m afraid I know little more than you do,” he admitted after a while, the words colored with a quiet laugh. “They read us in, of course, the minds they’d gathered back then. A think tank of sorts, with a moon-shot directive to ‘solve the problem of giant monsters, once and for all.’ I was _for_ it, in the beginning, and by the end I’d started to realize I was against it, but as it turned out, it didn’t actually matter.”

He turned to look Masako in the eye, the Battra ranger sparing a lens to hold his gaze.

“Of all the plans we’d concocted, new weapons and containment initiatives… what happened on that day was something not a single one of us could explain. Whatever power sealed the kaiju in the coins, it wasn’t something we created, nor had we speculated upon anything of the sort. I’ll guarantee you every last member of that committee has spent the last two decades wondering what the hell really happened, and not all of us are content to remain in the dark.”

Masako blinked. “Is that you were here? On the island?”

Professor Ando gave a light wave with an idle hand. “Among other, more official reasons, of course, but it matters little now.”

“Sorry it didn’t pan out.” Masako acknowledged with a downcast shrug.

“Perhaps it wasn’t a total loss,” the professor mused, staring back into the distance where Monster Island had nearly disappeared. “Seeing Dagahra resurrected from the long past now has me thinking of something… peculiar.”

Masako eyed him curiously. “Thinking about what?”

“About the _last_ time a kaiju was sealed away, held as prisoner by a disc of metal.”

  


* * *

  


Waves rolled around the boat, the time passing in long hours to the mainland. The Battra zord had kept at its persistent hover, far off starboard and gliding through the air above.

From the smaller deck on the roof of the cabin, Masako stared out at the machine, arms crossed over another railing as she pondered. Was the auto-pilot feature inherent of the zord, or was it tied to Battra’s consciousness somehow? It wasn’t direct control, she knew, since that would have evidently gone against the purpose of the coins’ existence in the first place.

Of all people, it was Shannon that climbed out of the roof hatch, awkward in held silence as she sat down on one of the built-in benches set along the sides.

“Yeah, I’m back,” Masako spoke up. “Just need to make sure you all don’t sink, or break down at sea, or… this morning I watched an Oodako attack a finning boat pretty far away from the island. Can never be too careful out here.”

When the quiet only continued, Masako sighed, and turned toward the girl on the bench. Whatever she’d been about to say, though, the eyes on her stopped her in her tracks.

Shannon broke off her staring, eyes lowering in hesitance.

“Kristina says you’ve seen a lot of death.”

Masako had picked up on it before, but now she could see it plain as day. “So have you.”

Shannon jumped faintly in surprise, but looked up with both fear and understanding. “You may have the power, the drive, of a monster, but you, yourself, are still human. Your soul might not always be able to endure things Battra’s will with ease. I hope you aren’t forgetting that.”

With a sigh, Masako shook her head.

“I was like this _before_ Battra,” she admitted, taking a seat on the far end of the bench and allowing her ranger armor to slip away. “I do bad things to bad people, and most of the time it’s still less than they deserve. I _understand_ not being able to stomach that… that’s how I was. Then I had to not be.”

“Revenge is a sickness,” Shannon said with far too much certainty. “You can’t let it take you.”

“I do what I do for the people who are still alive,” Masako stated firmly. “It’s not about revenge… not anymore.”

There were definitely more holes Shannon could have poked in that argument, like the clear indulgence she’d shown today when she hadn’t needed to, but the other girl stayed silent, almost respectful in her restraint.

They sat like that for a while, until Shannon left without a word. The seas were calm, and safe harbor approached for those Masako had taken under her charge.

_So, gonna call me out? You’ve been quiet for a while._

_ WHAT ARE YOU EXPECTING BATTRA TO SAY? _

Masako would admit some amount of surprise. _Well, we can start with why I went to the island, and DON’T tell me you don’t already know._

_ …THERE WERE TWO REASONS. _

_Yes? And?_

_ …YOU WISHED TO SAVE LIVES. BEFORE YOU KNEW OF THEIR WORTH. _

_I know. Fancy that, I actually wanted to be the hero for once. Must seem an awful lot like weakness._

_ YOU HAVE PROVEN, AND CONTINUE TO PROVE, YOUR COMMITMENT TO THE EARTH, MASAKO. YOU HAVE EARNED SOME LEVEL OF TRUST IN DETERMINING WHICH HUMANS ARE TO DIE, AND WHICH TO BE SPARED. BATTRA OFFERS NO CRITICISM. _

_None? You sure? I could’ve always just turned around and left, if that was the call, but I took the chance they’d be good people, which even I know should be the wrong move from what I told you about the odds of that._

_ PERHAPS YOU ARE NOT FALTERING, AND WE ARE BOTH SIMPLY LEARNING THAT REALITY IS NOT WHOLLY AS WE PROFESS IT TO BE. _

Masako paused at that. 

_You good, Battra? That sounded like…_

_ I AM ALLOWED TO BE WRONG. _

There was a cavernous silence in Masako’s head, but one Battra held in reserve.

_ I HAVE ALWAYS IMAGINED HUMANS AS BEING RULED BY IGNORANCE, OR SELF-INTEREST AT THE WORST, BUT TODAY I HAVE SEEN DESTRUCTION OUT OF MALICE, CRUELTY, AND INTENT, TO A DEGREE I HAD NOT CONSIDERED AS A FACTOR. I BELIEVE I CAN NO LONGER ATTRIBUTE RESPONSIBILITY TO HUMANS AS ONE SPECIES, ONE COLLECTIVE THREAT. _

Masako twisted a bit of a smirk. _Took you long enough._

_ THIS DOES NOT ABSOLVE THOSE WHOSE INACTION PLACES THEM ON THE SIDE OF CATACLYSM, BUT I WILL ALLOW YOU THIS: WHEN WE HAVE ROOTED OUT ALL THOSE THAT REPRESENT THE SUM OF TRUE DANGER TO THE EARTH… PERHAPS THERE WILL BE CAUSE TO REEVAULUATE THE FATE THAT MUST BEFALL THE REST OF YOU. _

It was a long, several moments before Masako could decide how she truly wanted to react, but a breath of relief pushed through. _Thank you_ , she thought softly, then added, _I didn’t need that, but it’s appreciated._

 _AND THE OTHER REASON?_ Battra prodded, moving on quickly. _WHY ELSE WAS THE ISLAND OF IMPORTANCE?_

_If you don’t already know, it’s only because something’s stopping you from believing it._

_ …YOU MEANT WHAT YOU TOLD ME, ABOUT INVESTIGATING THE IMPRISONMENT OF THE KAIJU. _

_Battra, you talk a lot about my ‘tribe.’ Not just the people I protect, but the people I trust, and think of as family, whether I’ve met them or not. What you don’t seem to get, is that you’re part of that, too._

She reached into her jacket, pulling out the medallion now on a chain around her neck.

_I still don’t know a lot about the power coins, but I get the sense that I could just… crush this, destroy it somehow, and you’d be free. That’s how it must’ve worked with Dagahra, Megaguirus, probably most of the other kaiju the Rangers fought. But I can also sense that what’s stopping me from doing that… isn’t me, and somehow I doubt you’re that scared of the Rangers putting you back that you wouldn’t even try. Something’s different about us. We understand each other, and maybe… maybe that’s the point, and if even the Xiliens could realize we’d be good together, I’m probably not the only one who’s got it figured. Whatever these coins were made for, the Rangers are what came out of it, and it’s not just about powers, it’s about… being the same. Having to fight the same battles. And that’s been just about my entire fucking life, so yeah… not so hard for you to be family to me._

Battra fell silent again, which at this point, was about as much as an eye-rolling, faintly grinning Masako could have truly expected.

_You can tell me later._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art of the zord designs in this story, and how they work, can be found [here](https://thezanyarthropleura.tumblr.com/post/638166798194425856/dont-tell-me-how-this-game-ends-the-zord).


End file.
